XenApp Production Farm in EC2

This blueprint documents how a Citrix XenApp Production Farm can be deployed in Amazon EC2. It consists of five servers total, a Domain Controller/DNS Server with Active directory, a Citrix License server, a Citrix Web Interface server with Secure Gateway installed, and two XenApp Application servers. A Production XenApp Farm needs to scale. Some customers run hundreds of XenApp Application servers in their datacenter, and this proof of concept shows that it can be done in the cloud as well.

Technical Overview

In this scenario, a complete XenApp Farm is built in Amazon EC2 to deliver applications from two-to-N XenApp Servers. One of the XenApp servers is hosting Microsoft Office 2010 Beta, and the second XenApp server is hosting basic Windows applications such as Notepad, Wordpad, Calculator and Internet Explorer. You can add additional XenApp servers to add more capacity and applications to the XenApp farm.

To use this farm, launch the five pre-configured servers, then point your browser to the Web Interface server using HTTP or HTTPS - Secure Gateway is installed as well. The applications that have been pre-configured will show up in the browser.

Locating and Starting Citrix AMI's:

The Citrix AMI's can be located in the Amazon Console (http://console.aws.amazon.com), by navigating to "AMIs" Enter "Citrix" in the viewing field. The Citrix Open Cloud images will be listed. You can launch any of them by performing a right-click and selecting "Launch Instance of this AMI."

Domain Authentication:

In this XenApp Farm, a Domain Controller has been built for use with the farm. You should be able to authenticate to this Domain Controller.

Computer Name:

The computer name or hostname of the license server is tied to the Citrix XenApp License file, and you should not change the name. You can change the name if you obtain your own license file.

AMI Specifications:

Platform:

Windows Server 2008R2. These AMI's are based on or built on the Amazon base AMI for Windows 2008 R2. These machines are part of a domain, xa6.com, and the License Server hostname is lic.

Citrix Components

The following Citrix components are installed on this Server:

• XenApp 6.0 for Windows Server 2008R2
• Web Interface 5.4
• Citrix license Server 11.6.1
• Citrix Online Plugin 12.1
  

Licenses:

BYOL - Bring Your Own Licenses.

• You will need a license for Citrix XenApp License Server, the license server in this blueprint contains a developer license.
• You will need a license for Microsoft Terminal Services.

Citrix Configurations

Because Secure Gateway is installed on the Web Interface server, altaddr and the required configuation for Amazon NAT is not required. Nothing more needs to be done with this requirement.

To access this farm, create an entry in your hosts file for xa6.com pointing to the Web Interface server's external Amazon IP Address.

Port Numbers:
Make sure the Amazon Security Group, in addition to your firewall and Router allows the following ports to pass through:
Tcp port 1494 citrix ica
Tcp port 2598 citrix session reliability
Tcp port 80 http
Tcp port 443 https
Tcp port 3389 rdp

Citrix Applications

There is one Web Interface site running Secure Gateway. There is also a Services site that can be used with the Citrix Online Plugin.
The following applications are published on XenApp server 1:

• Notepad
• Additional applications can be published in the Delivery Services Console on XA1 server.