Thursday, 05 March 2009 10:26 | 
Author: Nico van Meurs | 
Part 2: Installing and Configuring the Citrix Provisioning Server environment
Installing Provisioning Server Platform
1. Insert the media and choose Install Server for 32bit/64bit Platform (depending on your OS)
2. Read through the License Agreement
3. Fill in the customer information
4. Choose the destination folder
5. Choose Installation Type
Use Custom installation when not using the Provisioning Server network services, or when you don’t want to install the console.
6. Click Install to begin the installation. After the installation the Configuration Wizard automatically starts.
Configuration Wizard
1. Click Next
2. Choose to use DHCP on another computer
3. Choose to use PXE on another computer
4. Choose create farm
5. Fill in the name of the SQL server
6. When using SQL Express add the instance name SQLEXPRESS
7. New Farm:
a. Fill in the name of the database
b. Fill in the Farm name
c. Fill in the name of the first Site, e.g. LocalSite(additional sites can be configured after the installation)
d. Fill in the name of the first device collection, e.g. XenApp Servers (additional collections can be configured after the installation)
e. Choose Use Active Directory groups for security
f. Select the PVS Admin group (only groups that the installation user is member of are listed)
9. Fill in the name of the License server you installed in Part 1
10. Choose “Specified user account”
11. Fill in the credentials for the PVS service account
12. Select “Configure the database for the account” to set the correct permissions for the service account on the database.
Select this option only when creating a new farm, never when adding servers to the farm.
13. Choose the network adapter and portrange for the streaming traffic. And choose the portrange for streaming traffic.
Best practice is to use two seperate networks, one for communications with the domain and a separate one for the streaming traffic.
14. Select if you want to use the Provisioning Server TFTP service. Use this options when no existing TFTP server is available.
15. When using Provisioning Server TFTP add the IP-addresses of all Provisioning Servers in your farm
16. Click Finish to configure Provisioning Server
Prepare Provisioning Server farm
Now the Provisioning Server farm is installed and configured, there are some manual actions that need to be done before we can build and stream images.
- Create a store: A store needs to be created for storing the XenApp images.
- Active Directory Password Support must be enabled so Provisioning Server can take control over AD machine account password management.
1. Start the Provisioning Server console
2. Right Click store and choose Create Store
3. Choose a name for the store, e.g LocalSiteStore
4. Fill in a description for the store
5. Choose the site that acts as owner of the store e.g. LocalSite
6. In the Path tab, type the location of the vDisk folder we created in part 1
7. Add a default writecache path: Type the location of the cache folder we created in part 1
8. In the Servers tab, select the Provisioning Server(s) that must provide images from this store
9. Click the Servers node in LocalSite
10. Right click the Provisioning Server and choose properties
11. In the Options tab, enable Automatic Password Support
12. Accept the default of 7 days
13. Click OK
Creating a vDisk
A vDisk must be created. This vDisk will contain the XenApp image and will be streamed to the clients.
1. Right click the store and choose Create vDisk
2. Choose the Site to which the vDisk store must be added
3. Choose the Server used to create the vDisk
4. Choose a name for the vDisk.
Use versioning in the image name so you can make registration about which vDisk contains which changes, e.g Base-XenApp-v01
5. Fill in the size of the vDisk, e.g. 30GB. When determining the size of the vDisk take into account future growth of the image.
6. Choose VHD format;
| Fixed | When using fixed format the complete size of the vDisk will be immediately reserved on the storage system. |
| Dynamic | When using Dynamic format only the space that is actually being used on the vDisk is being reserved on the storage system. This can save a lot of storage space. |
Now we have setup the Provisioning Server environment and prepared the environment for the XenApp Image to be created. In the next part we will build the image. When buidling the XenApp image there are a lot of things that have te be taken into account, all these things will be covered in Part 3: Installing the Master Target Device and Building the XenApp Image.
NOTE: By the time I was writing part 3, Citrix published the Provisioning Services for XenApp Implementation Guide. I would recommend using this guide on the rest of your journey :)
You can find the guide here: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120513
) and is still busy designing and implementing SBC and VDI environments at customers, based on Citrix products. Besides consultancy Eelco is frequently asked for troubleshooting jobs and infrastructural challenges.