Windows 7 Made Easier with Citrix XenDesktop
4th January 2012
On April 8, 2014, security patches and hotfixes for all versions of Windows XP will no longer be available. This means to avoid potential security threats upgrading to Window 7 is a must! However, as you start to think about the way forward many dilemmas are raised… “Should we do an in-place upgrade or new installation?”, “What if the existing workstation isn’t powerful enough to run Win 7?” are just some!
So, why not consider the Citrix option of XenDesktop 5.5?
They use the figure “10” to market the ease of the product:
- 10 minutes to install
- 10 clicks to configure
- 10 seconds to add a new user
Although, this is a marketing piece, I have to say that it’s not too far out for a proof of concept project assuming the pre-requisites have already been completed. Obviously, these can take some time to prepare but most companies already use some form of virtualisation, Hyper-V, XenServer or the more popular vSphere – so you’d just need to build an optimised virtual Windows 7 machine. Additional thought does need to be given to your business applications, such as whether they work within a Windows 7 environment and how should they be deployed – within the master image, via XenApp (hosted or streamed), App-V or another technology.
The installation itself has minimal user interaction, it puts all the required components onto a single server ready to for you to follow through the “Quick Deploy” wizard to personalise your installation. The types of questions you are given consist of Site Name, Hypervisor and Deployment Method, Number of Machines and Users assignment. Once these choices have been made the virtual machines are provisioned by Machine Creation Service and are ready to use!
The last choice is to determine which client device to use, re-build the workstation to be a dumb client, replace it with Wyse Zero client, utilise Open Source software like OpenThinClient – there any many options. What is great is that Citrix can be access from pretty much any operating system including Apple, Android, Blackberry, Linux, Windows and even Chrome! So you can even use this for a remote worker, Disaster Recovery option or even temporally for an environmental situation like last winter’s snow!
I have to mention the support tool “Desktop Director”, which has been designed specifically for Help Desk teams. It gives a single comprehensive view through IE, Firefox or Safari showing an Instant overview, Diagnostics and real-time Monitoring of the XenDesktop environment and each individual virtual machine.
Author, Rob