6.2 Gathering Critical Information for Design Activities

You need to gather information to help you design your specific implementation for deploying Novell ZENworks 11 on a Citrix Server.

Review the following sections:

6.2.1 Performing 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 two main results from a technical assessment are documentation on your findings, along with a set of tasks that you need to perform. Information that you should gather includes the following:

  • Which version of Citrix Server should you use?

    For more information on the supported versions of Citrix Server, see the ZENworks 11 SP2 Server Installation Guide.

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

    If the maximum number of user sessions per server is more than the recommended number, try adding more servers to the Citrix farm. We plan to provide such recommendations for the ZENworks 11 Configuration Management product after the product is released.

  • 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 in to the server. However, if the policy or bundle is applicable to all the users logging in to 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 in to 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?

    Make sure that no single server is overloaded. For information on load balancing mechanisms, see the Citrix Web site.

  • Is the Novell Client installed on the 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 you do, 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 you do, how often is it used?

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

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

    You must deploy ZENworks 11 on 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.

6.2.2 Factors Influencing Scalability

The main physical factor that govern the scalability of the Citrix servers is the RAM. The majority of operations are performed by three services: zenworksWindowsService, ZenNotifyIcon, and zenUserDaemon. The RAM consumption depends on the number of sessions and the number of effective assignments that each session has.

For the minimum hardware recommendations, refer to the Citrix Web site. If you can provide hardware that exceeds these recommendations, your system will perform better. Additional processing power and faster drives can make the systems more responsive.

The other factors that you need to consider include:

  • Device refresh frequency

  • Bundle schedules

  • System requirements

6.2.3 Scale Numbers

The information will be available for ZENworks 11 Configuration Management product after the product is released.

6.2.4 Ports Used by the ZENworks Agent

For information on the ports used by the ZENworks Agent, see the ZENworks 11 SP2 Server Installation Guide.