XenApp on AWS Reference Architecture

XenApp on AWS Reference Architecture -

After much work in collaboration with our friends on AWS in our laboratories and more on the AWS platform itself, we are finally ready to announce the availability of XenApp reference architecture on AWS. Yes, we already have more than a year a set of tools that allows you to turn a XenApp farm on AWS using CloudFormation technology. Aimed primarily at the use cases to verify that the various options that AWS provides a XenApp deployments.

See here for the v3 version of these tools. Note that we have a little update these for you as well in the day or more.

In our laboratories, we have worked hard to provide a reference architecture of XenApp to companies or service providers. Entities that have needs to incorporate or integrate with existing infrastructures. We focused on two common scenarios:

XenApp on AWS common deployment scenarios

XenApp can support a variety of applications and hosted shared goals desktop delivery. We focused on two of the most common scenarios in relation to
leveraging AWS: Hybrid Extension Farm XenApp and XenApp Hosted Cloud Farm. The main difference between the two models is the location of the resources of the database layer and access.
Hybrid XenApp Farm Extension
In this scenario, a company wants to run XenApp in its business to support internal users. The company is expanding its deployment on site to the
cloud to increase capacity, improve performance, or scale-intensive components resources in the cloud, if needed. This model also provides higher
availability for business continuity and disaster recovery provided the user data is available at the event. Connectivity for this model is based on
CloudBridge Connector NetScaler feature that creates a secure environment and optimized for XenApp deployments VPN tunnel between on-premise and
AWS Availability Zones. See figure below illustrates this scenario.

XenApp Cloud Hosted Farm
In this scenario, XenApp is used by an oriented IT organization services as a basis for providing workstations and hosted applications as a shared service. All XenApp
services and user data are stored completely in the AWS cloud using multiple availability zones within a single AWS Region. enterprise application data and
user authentication remain on the premises. This model is also based on the NetScaler CloudBridge Connector feature to create secure tunnels for corporate data with
AWS region and its Availability Zones. The figure below illustrates this scenario

Key elements that distinguish this scenario from the previous hybrid scenario are :.

• access and Web layer located in the AWS cloud
• Active Directory domain controllers residing in the farm (not associated with the user environment)

We created two documents for you. A white paper that guides you through the design decisions related to the design and implementation of each of these scenarios.

And an implementation guide that provides the necessary measures to be taken to effectively implement each of these scenarios.

two guides working from a modular approach that places each of the different layers either on site or in the AWS cloud.

Implementation Guide walks you through the CloudFormation templates that come with each layer. Now if you are not an expert of CloudFormation, do not worry. This advanced implementation guide provides an appointment through examples of templates provided and describes specific AWS implementation details so you can customize and deploy a solution that best meets your business, computer requirements and safety. It follows the scheme presented in the Citrix XenApp on AWS Reference Architecture white paper so you can follow along as you roll the sample models. It covers many aspects of deploying and operating a XenApp farm on AWS, ranging aspects such as building a CloudBridge, creating a XenApp farm that covers availability zones or NetScaler gateway. But also addresses arguments such as the addition of XenApp farm workers to servers to add capacity or dynamically start and stop the workers. However, you can also find Windows-based infrastructure components in chapter 2 and 3 useful as a general reference for the deployment such as Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft SQL Server in the AWS cloud.

Go check. As always, we appreciate your comments about our new reference architecture for XenApp on AWS guides.

Peter

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