18.1 Perform a Technical Assessment

You need to perform a technical assessment to review what you already have, identify what you need, and document your requirements. You also need to have a good understanding of the existing infrastructure. To do this, you should hold a set of workshops or meetings to obtain all the information you need. The following are the key questions you need to answer in order to plan your deployment:

  • Which version of Citrix XenApp should you use?

    For more information on the supported versions of Citrix XenApp, see the ZENworks Server Installation Guide.

  • What is the maximum number of user sessions per server that can be active on Citrix XenApp?

    If the maximum number of user sessions per server is more than the recommended number, try adding more servers to the Citrix farm. In general, Novell recommends that each server supports no more than 20 to 25 users.

  • Is user-based management used?

    If it is used, a policy or bundle must be assigned to the users only if the policy or bundle is not applicable to all the users logging into the server. However, if the policy or bundle is applicable to all the users logging into the server, assign it to the device instead of assigning it to all the users.

    For example, if there are 150 bundles that are assigned to the users and 50 bundles are common to all the users logging into a device, assign these 50 bundles to the device instead of the user.

  • Are servers available in the Citrix farm? If they are, how many servers are available and are these servers load balanced?

    Ensure that no single server is overloaded. For information on load balancing mechanisms, see the Citrix website.

  • Is the Novell Client installed on a Citrix server?

    If the Novell Client is not installed on a Citrix server, the Citrix server session might crash during login. To avoid this issue, see Tasks to be Performed after Deploying the Agent on Citrix Servers.

  • Do you plan to use the DLU policy? If yes, are the profiles volatile?

    If there is more than one Citrix server in a farm, you must use the volatile DLU and Roaming Profile policies to enable the users and their profiles to exist on all the servers in the farm. If you do not use the volatile DLU and Roaming Profile policies, a profile synchronization issue might exist among the servers.

  • Do you have a mechanism to handle idle and disconnected sessions? If yes, how often is it used?

    The idle and disconnected sessions should be periodically logged out to enable ZENworks events such as memory release and policy unenforcement to occur. Otherwise, the server might have high memory consumption.

  • Are the Citrix servers used only to distribute applications, or are they also used as terminal servers?

    You must deploy ZENworks 11 on a Citrix server only if you want the Citrix server to be used as a terminal server in addition to distributing applications. However, if you only intend to distribute applications, you can create thin client bundles and assign them to devices or users.