Citrix training

Hi all,

Anyone have any recommendations for some Citrix training videos, for free?

I've a training session on Monday afternoon with our Technical Directer, and I've never done anything with it and know nothing about it at all.

I'd at least like some basic understanding of it before going into the training.

I'm assuming here you'll be back end focused, rather than a standard user, just using the citrix environment?

These any good?

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD04430CDE2E93812

Honestly, I have no idea, but i hate going into training without knowing anything so any videos or training at all to give me an overview of any part of it is gratefully received.

Thanks

If you give us an idea of what your role is we may be better equipped to help!

You must have some idea if you're going to be supporting it or just using it, an afternoon doesn't seem like long enough to get very in depth but way too long just to show you how to access and use a citrix session.

Citrix is the company, what product are your referring to XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer (yes Citrix love the word XEN) or Netscaler, which goes a thru rename every few minutes. They used to have a product named NFuse which was abbreviated to NF - it finally got renamed

I design implement and manage a XenApp 6.5 farm and also Netscaler appliance box

Theres also the mobile device management and mobile application management side of it all XenMobile and Appcontroller (now just XenMobile) and many other products;

As jfish says - Netscaler
Provisioning service (PVS)
Machine creation services (MCS)
Command Center - used to manage multiple Netscalers
Insight Services (used to be called TaaS / tools as a service i think) log file analysis via CDF monitor (Citrix diagnostic facility)
Other diagnostic facilityies - CDF trace, PVS data tools
Insight Center - Reporting
Director - new reporting
Edgesight - monitoring and reporting (now eol)

The big products are XenApp and XenDesktop though - delivering applications and/or virtual desktops to users. Prior to Xenapp it was called Presentation server, Metaframe, Winframe

XenApp/desktop often combines multiple of the above products such as Netscalers (you may hear them referred to as a CAG - citrix access gateway) a secure device which is a reverse proxy and used for many other things like load balancing, Web interface or storefront server(s) for enumerating the applications and desktops and XenApp and/or XenDesktop servers which the apps and desktops are hosted on.
Other things are thrown in the mix too like licence servers, STA (secure ticket authority) different types of reporting, group policy management packs like Citrix profile manager, logging and tracing tools, Hypervisors such as XenServer, VMware, HyperV, Provisioning services or machine creation services, Sharefile (Citrix version of dropbox) and many many other product offerings.

Citrix also offers public cloud based solutions, called something like Evergreen which is hosted on Microsoft Azure infrastructure

I work for a global company so to use most of the above but have limited knowledge in some areas as there is a LOT to learn. Thats the reason I enjoy it though, it would be boring if it was easy! At the moment I am focussing on the PVS side of things (streaming XenApp OS VMs using images) and Netscaler. Using PVS is fantastic to manage as uses versioning but brings issues with it as the OS is streamed it relies on network and storage to be 100% stable

Most of this stuff moves faster than the training, you're better off in most cases reading the blogs of prominent experts in the field and labbing the stuff out yourself. If you're purely in a support role for a company where you need to hit cert targets then feel free to go along with their learning plans for the position.

Guest2 said:

I am focussing on the PVS side of things (streaming XenApp OS VMs using images) and Netscaler. Using PVS is fantastic to manage as uses versioning but brings issues with it as the OS is streamed it relies on network and storage to be 100% stable

Click to expand...

PVS is bloody fantastic. I have used it for many years and set-up right, it just works. It's one system I never have to maintain or troubleshoot. We provision everything from XenApp to XenDesktop and even our web servers. Why wouldn't your underlying infrastructure be 100%?

It's resilient as anything too. I've lost network connection to my PVS network before (we multihome PVS as it used to be best practice. No need for it anymore) but didn't notice until I rebooted a machine as enough of the OS was cached for it not to rely on the network.

Anyway, just here to sing its praises

ubern00b said:

PVS is bloody fantastic. I have used it for many years and set-up right, it just works. It's one system I never have to maintain or troubleshoot. We provision everything from XenApp to XenDesktop and even our web servers. Why wouldn't your underlying infrastructure be 100%?

It's resilient as anything too. I've lost network connection to my PVS network before (we multihome PVS as it used to be best practice. No need for it anymore) but didn't notice until I rebooted a machine as enough of the OS was cached for it not to rely on the network.

Anyway, just here to sing its praises

Click to expand...

We don't look after core infrastructure - VMs, storage, physical servers etc. There is a seperate team to manage that (as there are hundreds of VMs in multiple datacenters)

I thought if network connection is lost the OS would freeze as its streamed and require a hard reset of the VM? If the VMs are on a SAN which has latency issues, wouldnt this cause issues?

But yes, PVS is great using versioning to control things