Let me begin by saying that it has been a rather painful experience to learn/deal with Citrix XenApp 6. The documentation Citrix provides in their site regarding XenApp on Amazon EC2 is either outdated or slightly inaccurate (and therein a bigger problem). The problem is fundamental and one I'm afraid of Citrix has done on purpose: even a small mistake during installation can spoil your install forever and leaving you with very little options other than to start anew (literally! start from a clean OS image). The same is also true for upgrading/downgrading XenApp: it's just not possible to uninstall and upgrade. You must do fresh install from scratch. Citrix's XenApp forums seem to be packed with troubleshooting threads full of "I have that problem too" replies most of which with no official response/answer. They have two official blog entries specific to XenApp on EC2, but they are either no longer true or assume you have substantial knowledge of Citrix XenApp (and all its tricky parts). So, in this blog entry, I'm going to try to document my steps so that if should someone else find themselves on the same boat, they can at least go over these steps and see if they are of any help.
For the steps that follow, I'm going to assume that, just like me, the reader has little or no experience installing or administering Citrix XenApp and that the XenApp install is intended for external access to apps (sans VPN). I'm further going to assume the reader has an active EC2 account and that he or she is able to launch new instances and that he or she is well aware that this will incur in charges in accordance to AWS EC2 pricing.
1. Launch (i.e. new) a large instance with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server Express and IIS (AMI Id: ami-42bd442b). SQL Server and IIS are requirements. Make sure you do so with a valid keypair so that you can later retrieve and decrypt the auto-generated Administrator password.
2. After waiting a few minutes retrieving the instance's auto-generated admin password, fire up your favorite Remote Desktop client and start a session to the instance you just launched.
3. Download (to the instance) and install whatever ISO-mounting software you prefer and install, I use PowerISO.
4. In your instance go to start menu and type "EC2Config" and wait until "EC2ConfigService Settings" shows up, select to run it.
4.a. Once the utility comes up, make sure to uncheck "Set Computer Name", "Initialize Drives", and "Set Password". Click Apply then OK.
5. Go to start menu, find "Computer", right click, click on Properties in the contextual menu.
5.a. In the Computer name, domain and workgroup settings click on Change settings, then click on the Change... button and give your computer a new name (prefearably something you easily remember and you'll use this name for installation and licensing steps as well).
5.b. Click OK couple times and you'll be prompted to reboot, click ok and then click on Close. Reboot.
6. Go to Citrix -> Product And Solutions -> XenApp -> Try (here) -> choose "Turnkey solution for small businesses up to 75 users" follow registration procedures until you're prompted to download and you're given a license number. If you already have a license number for XenApp 6 Fundamentals, you can try downloading directly here.
7. Enable .NET 3.5 (and make sure you don't have .NET 4+ installed).
8. Mount the ISO as a logical drive (with PowerISO or whatever ISO tool you use).
9. In your file explorer navigate to: {DRIVE LETTER}:\W2k8 and click on setup.exe (after agreeing to the license terms, ofter a dialog warning will show up telling you that other users might be logged on, ignore that and click OK). Please note that setup.exe must be "Run as Administrator", else it will fail.
9.a. In the setup workflow set Application Server as installation type.
9.b. Since this will be a test/trial environment, select "Disable Shadowing" then click next.
10. Set your admin username and password. I recommend using the same Domain\UserName and password you have in that machine.
Hopefully the installation will now complete successfully. If it failed along the way, it can be rather difficult to debug since the log file messages are rather devoid of any semantic meaning. As a last ditch effort, try uninstalling the very last module that failed to install/configure. and the try setup.exe again (of course, don't forget to "Run as Administrator").
Re/Sources:
PowerCram
Citrix XenApp on EC2 blog entry
Hola Ruben,
ReplyDeleteI need to set up XenApp on EC2 to deliver virtual desktops to 50 users. Would you be interested in doing this implementation remotely? Are your skills up to date for this? We are located in Mexico.
Please drop me an email.
René