My first time: Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS)

After years of MCS virginity I decided it’s finally time to ditch the little farms and try out good ol’ Citrix Machine Creation Services.

Introduction

So today is my very first time: After years of MCS virginity I decided it’s finally time to ditch the little farms and try out good ol’ Citrix Machine Creation Services. In the last ten years I almost exclusively installed small deployments. The big ones have about 150 concurrent user. All are build upon XenApp 6.5 or XenApp 7.6+ with static persistent virtual machines. I always told myself, that static persistent virtual machines, together with a fully automated patch management (for example: PDQ) are enough. And this is still true, because the maintenance effort is virtually not existent. But it really bugs me, that I’m not equally familiar with at least one of the provisioning methods. You might ask, why I don’t try to learn PVS instead. Well, the simple reason is that my stomach tells me not to. The more valid reason is that MCS is included in every XenApp license and doesn’t require additional infrastructure. And additional infrastructure is always a really big topic for the customer.

This blog post won’t be a real classical Blog HowTo Guide, but more of a report of my journey to help me keep track about what I do. Maybe others suffer the same knowledge gap and are interested in my findings and the path I take. Continue reading “My first time: Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS)”

HowTo: Upgrade your Delivery Controller to Citrix XenApp 7.18

In this post we will upgrade our Citrix XenApp Delivery Controllers to version 7.18.

On June 9th, 2018 the Citrix XenApp Current Release was updated to version 7.18:

In this blog post I’m describing the upgrade path for the Delivery Controller.

My environment:

  • Two Delivery Controller 7.15.0 on Windows Server 2016
  • MS SQL Database is on a separate SQL Server 2014

The Official Upgrade guide by Citrix: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/xenapp-and-xendesktop/current-release/upgrade-migrate/upgrade.html

Download: https://www.citrix.com/downloads/xenapp-and-xendesktop/product-software/xenapp-and-xendesktop-718.html

What’s new: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/xenapp-and-xendesktop/current-release/whats-new.html

Continue reading “HowTo: Upgrade your Delivery Controller to Citrix XenApp 7.18”