ICA pass-through with RES Software Workspace Manager 2011 and two Citrix XenApp Farms

19 december 2011 om 16:33 Wouter Arts General

The Citrix XenApp Publishing integration feature of RES Software's Workspace Manger 2011 has been around for quite a while now. The Citrix XenApp Publishing feature enables you to automatically publish Managed Applications into a Citrix XenApp Farm. This saves administrators the effort of configuring applications twice in their environment and rules out human errors during this process. When publishing an application with Workspace Manager Integration this is Citrix XenApp Farm independent. Workspace Manager communicates to the Citrix XenApp server where the Workspace Management Console is installed on and from there the Citrix XenApp Server communicates to either it's Data Collector or directly to the Citrix XenApp Data Store and that way the application gets published.

The Citrix XenApp Publishing Integration is designed for integrating with only one Citrix XenApp Farm. In some scenarios it's necessary to have a second Citrix XenApp Farm running on a previous Windows Server Platform because some legacy applications ( 16 or 32 bit) require this platform and these applications simply do not work on a 64 bit Operating System. However theoretically it should be possible to integrate with multiple Citrix XenApp Farms because the publishing itself is performed by the Citrix XenApp Server and only initiated from Workspace Manager. This however, has never been the intention when the Citrix XenApp Publishing Integration feature has been designed and is not encouraged and recommended by RES Software itself.

The best practice for using RES Software Workspace Manager 2011 on multiple Citrix XenApp Farms is using ICA pass-through (by launching .ICA files) with Single Sign On (SSO). This results in the ability to offer transparent access to the legacy application from the end-users perspective. However, only publishing .ICA files results in the legacy applications published on the secondary Citrix XenApp Farm being unmanaged by the Workspace Manager's Workspace Composer. The Workspace composer is the component which builds the user's context including drive mappings, printers, application shortcuts etc. The trick for getting the legacy applications Workspace Manager 2011 managed is using a four-stage rocket concept.

First Stage ? Create ICA Files

The first stage is storing .ICA files can be stored on a central network location like a network share or DFS volume.

The .ICA files use HttpBrowserAddress of the Citrix XenApp Legacy servers for high availability reasons. An example ICA file can look like this:

Also note the required configuration lines to enable Single Sign On.

Warning: When using Citrix XenApp 6.5 for Windows Server 2008 R2 you will need hotfix XA650W2K8R2X64001 to fix a bug in the Single Sign On feature. See this thread on the Citrix Support Forums

You will also need Citrix XenApp XML DNS Resolution, see Citrix Knowledge Base Article CTX128436 on how to enable this feature.

Depending on your Active Directory Authentication model you might also have to enable Kerberos authentication which is described in Citrix Knowledge Base Article CTX121918.

It's wise to test the .ICA files first outside of the RES Software components to make sure the .ICA files are working correctly and Single Sign On is functioning well. Also note that ICA pass-through requires the Citrix Receiver Enterprise, which includes the Program Neighborhood Agent functionality. Details about the different Citrix Receiver versions can be found here and more information about the Citrix Receiver Command Line Parameters can be found here.

Second Stage ? RES Workspace Manager Action #1

The second stage is getting these .ICA files being called upon as a Managed Application from the Workspace Manager 2011.

This can be achieved by creating a Managed Application within Workspace Manager 2011 which is directing the Citrix Receiver (Good old ICA Client having a make-over) and pointing to the correct .ICA file on the network location.

Third Stage ? RES Workspace Manager Action #2

This stage is required to enable your users to actually launch the application on the legacy environment. Because this application will be launched from the Workspace Composer session on the legacy Citrix XenApp server and you don't want your users to be confused by providing duplicate shortcuts for every legacy application this application can be made hidden, but do not disable this application!

Now we have created the relevant application twice within the Workspace Manager 2011 environment, one application is being used to kick of the Citrix Receiver and the second application is hidden and is kicked off by the Citrix XenApp Published application in the next stage.

Fourth Stage ? Publish application on legacy Citrix XenApp Farm

After completing the second stage the legacy application can be started as a seamless published application but still isn't managed with Workspace Manager 2011 yet. To achieve this you will have to manually reproduce the steps which Workspace Manager 2011 is doing when automatically publishing applications using the Citrix XenApp Publishing Integration feature. This is effectively being done by modifying the Location command and startup path from the properties of the published applications in the Citrix XenApp Farm. It's essential to use the correct identification number of the Managed Application of Workspace Manager 2011.

After completing every action required for using this four stage rocket you will be able to offer transparent and consistent access to (legacy) applications to your end users in a completely managed and secured way using RES Software's Workspace Manager 2011 solution.

The next logical step would be to phase out your legacy applications?

0 reacties

Reageer

Application Execution (592) 0.166123 s 8.516879 s 0.526872 s 0.267174 s
6,133.3047 kB 16,520.3555 kB 7,733.8221 kB 6,922.8242 kB