Citrix released yesterday a tech preview of their Service Template for XenDesktop 7.1 for System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
This template allows for rapid and easy deployment of an entire XenDesktop 7 infrastructure, including setup of Director, License Server, Desktop Delivery Controller and Storefront.
It does not by default include Netscaler as part of the that template but that is something we can add to the “mix” later.
the Techpreview of the template can be downloaded from mycitrix here –> https://www.citrix.com/downloads/xendesktop/betas-and-tech-previews/system-center-service-template-tech-preview.html (This requires a valid mycitrix account) it has a template for XenDesktop and for PVS.
ill continue on with the XenDesktop template and show how it is deployed.
The template contains a bunch of PowerShell scripts, XenDesktop 7.1 ISO file and the template file itself, in order to fully setup the template it needs to VMM ISO file and a generalized 2012 VHD file.
After we have downloaded the template file open VMM –>
Then go into Library and Import Template –>
Then point to the extracted XenDesktop folder.
Then choose next, now we need to point the template to the different ISO files and generalized 2012 template.
After that is done and the mappings are correct we can contine on with the importing.
This will take some time since it needs to import the XenDesktop to the library. When we now go into Service Templates we can see XenDesktop listed as an option there. If we right click and choose “Open Designer” we can see how the layout will look like.
Now if we wanted to we could use the Netscaler integration as well to deploy multiple DCC and Storefronts and automatically setup a load balancing of these services as part of the deployment. Lets see how that can be done using the Service Template. (Note that this integration is still not support in 2012 R2) (UPDATED: IT WORKS) but for the purpose of demonstrating how it CAN be done ill show it anyways. So after we have installed the addon and created a VIP template for DCC and one for Storefront we can open the designer again.
Next we can connect the VIP profiles to the different components, one DCC VIP template for DCC and one for Storefront which has different load balancing mechanisms setup.
Now If I where to configure a deployment of this. I can configure the amount of each server I want in order to ensure scailability and redudancy.
When I start the deploy wizard I get a question to define what is my management network.
Here I can define what is the backend of the netscaler and what the VIP addres of the load balancing solution is going to be.
But since the integration between Netscaler and VMM is not functioning in R2 ill need to get back on that in a later post (UPDATE IT WORKS). But if I go into one of the servers I can see the application scripts that are run in order to setup a functional site.
If I for instance have ComTrade installed on Operations Manager in order to have monitoring of my Citrix enviroment I can add this as a Application Configuration in the last step to have a complete, XenDesktop 7 setup with load balanced Netscaler solution and have complete monitoring using Operations Manager.
This is the power of Citrix and Microsoft!