Installing and Configuring Citrix XenApp 6.5 (Part 2)

Creating a XenApp Citrix Farm

The first server you install (well actually the first server you start the configuration process) will always create the Citrix XenApp farm for your infrastructure. We ended the first article with the figure showing the configure option in the XenApp Server Role Manager. When you choose configure the XenApp Server Configuration Wizard will be started. Sometimes you need to minimize the XenApp Server Role Manager window, because the XenApp Server Configuration window will be placed behind that window.

The first step in the XenApp Configuration wizard is to choose to set-up a new server farm or add the server to an existing farm. Because this is our first server, we choose Create a new server farm.

Every farm should have a (unique) name, so the first step in the farm creation is to give the farm a name. Also the account that will be the first Citrix Administrator needs to be specified. By default, the user which is logged in and starting the wizard will be filled in automatically, but the user can be changed when needed. Afterwards, more accounts/groups can be added via the XenApp AppCenter console.

The next question is about the database. As explained in part 1 use a normal SQL server when possible, only use the SQL express option when the farm is relatively small and you don’t have an SQL server available. I will choose Existing Microsoft SQL Server database.

After choosing an existing Microsoft SQL Server database, we need to provide the settings for the SQL server like the SQL server name, the name of the (predefined) database, and if you are using Windows or SQL authentication for the database. For this article I’m using SQL authentication.

The next step is to specify the account which will be used to access the database. As I selected SQL server authentication in the previous step I need to fill in the account created on the SQL server. Don’t forget to add the domain name when you are using Windows authentication.

Because Shadowing of users is forbidden in some countries you can enable or disable shadowing during the initial configuration process. When disabling shadowing here, there is no possibility to enable it again (only by reinstalling the whole server). So if regulations allow it enable shadowing here, but configure it later using Citrix policies.

The next window actually consists of four configuration options. The first tab called Data Collection is always grayed out for the first server. For the second and following server this option is configurable and I will describe it later on in this article. At the XML Service tab you can change the XML port if you want to change the default port. On the third tab Receiver you can configure the Service Site, it can be useful if you publish a desktop and have some silos for specific applications. With the Service Site this application can be shown within the desktop. But for other use cases you can leave this part empty. On the last tab you define which users will be added to Remote Desktop Users group and which are able to access the server later on.