After you have profiled Office 2007 in part 1 , you need to publish the applications through the Citrix XenApp Access Management Console. But before you do this you have to have a Citrix Web Interface server.

This is because we need to use the XenApp plugins for Hosted and Streamed applications. These require a Program Neighborhood Agent website to get the application configuration details.

The Web interface server can co-exist on a XenApp server, but would be better on its own server. Just be aware you may need to assign a different port to the web server as the XML listener uses TCP port 80 by default.

The prerequisits for installing the Citrix Web interface on a Windows Server 2003 server are:

  • DotNet 3.5
  • JSharp
  • IIS

Installing the Citrix Web interface is really pretty straight forward. If you have any issues look at support.Citrix.com for extra documentation.

Once installation is complete, you will need to configure a program neighborhood agent site. Accept the default settings. If you want to use pass through authentication you will need to modify the authentication settings. By default, prompt is the password method used.

Publishing

Open the XenApp access management console. Right click on the Applications folder.

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Click new Application

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Fill in the basic details and then select streamed to client.

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Fill in the profile location path and select the application from the profile for this published application.

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Select the users who can use the application and whether you will allow the application to be available offline. Note that you will have to add users to the offline access list as well if you allow offline usage.

Troubleshooting

Profiling applications in XenApp 5.0 is relatively easy. There are some limitations on the applications that you can profile. You cannot profile applications that need to install drivers or require services.

These tips will help you get the most out of application streaming:

  • Make sure you always start profiling with a clean machine, whether it is virtual or physical.
  • Understand the application and its requirements. This will help you build the dependencies it requires with other applications.
  • Always try to roll updates into the application installation sets.
  • Only install applications into a profile that are required. Link other profiles in as required.
  • Follow CTX116414, CTX113304, CTX118623, CTX118396 as very good starting points and then learn to apply these to your own requirements.
  • If you start getting issues with a Streamed application use radecache to clear the user or application cache

radecache [options] /flush:”<appname>”

Options for this command:
-i = flush install root, files, and registry
-if = flush install root, files only
-ir = flush install root, registry only
-u = flush user root, files and registry
-uf = flush user root, files only
-ur = flush user root, registry only
flush all – radecache /flushall

  • Use radedeploy to pre-cache the applications to your workstations.
  • Folder redirection may severely decrease the performance of the streamed application loading process.
  • The profile is stored in a CAB format. On the client you can extract the CAB file to help decrease the loading time.
  • Use the profile ignore rules to allow user files and registry keys to be used with the profiled application.

It would be better if the default rule sets only isolated the profiled applications and not the greater part of the system drive or whether you install the applications.

Summary

I have been testing Citrix Streamed applications since they were first released as an option in Citrix Presentation Server 4.5. I have had good and bad experiences and have learnt what I need to do to use them. It suits part of my environment very well. Up until recently I could not explain some very poor performance I was having on my workstation. It seems that it was related to my profile folder redirection.

XenApp 5.0 has released a new profiler and streaming client which has fixed one issue that I had. If you already use Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 or XenApp 5.0 Enterprise or Platinum then you should see if streamed applications can help you.

If you don’t use Citrix I would not buy it just for the streamed applications, but if you do I would not buy other vendor products until I had given it a good test.