Koetzing IT
Thomas Kötzing - Freiberufler, Analyst - MVP, CTP
Why bother with SMS when everyone has a smartphone these days? The point is when a new employee gets a brand new phone of the shelf it's not configured what so ever. Now you do know the phone number but that's it. Therefore, email is not an option and you're left with SMS to onboard the employee using XenMobile. I haven't really seen many companies who have their own SMS-Gateway. This is where email to SMS is a simple and quick option to do the job.
Fileserver in a multi-user environment is a central topic, because of user home drives and folder redirection in place. These days virtual Windows fileserver are quickly deployed but not really configured and left with just defaults. With Server 2012 R2 it means SMB 3.02 and is better than previous versions but 2012 R2 offers more and you should use it. Especially VMWare environments are not using features because they are turned off by default. Activating them alone is also not enough if the VM hasn't the right amount of resources and I often find central fileserver with just 1 vCPU and 4 GB RAM!
In my opinion, Citrix Director is the best peace in XenDesktop 7 if you don't see it as a replacement for EdgeSight. That is what Citrix does, calls it an EdgeSight replacement but again, in my opinion, was a mistake to do. For customer who really used or still use EdgeSight, the "New" EdgeSight is more or less a joke. For those customers, Citrix must come up with something else or acquire another software or company for it like "Nexthing".
Again, Director "EdgeSight" is a nice integration but here is my list that could be better and let's hope Citrix will do something about it.
Upgrading the Citrix Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) seems to be more and more a problem than an easy process. I don't understand it anyway why the VDA cannot be pushed by the DDC on request. Meanwhile, we have to fight Citrix and Microsoft to get the VDA installed or upgraded. Here are points you should follow to be successful.
With Internet Explorer 11 and above you must use the group policy Control Panel Settings within the Preferences. In previous versions of Internet Explorer and group policy you could use the Internet Explorer Maintanance but was causing a lot of trouble. The reason why Microsoft completly removed it from group policy. Instead you have to use the preferences and here are some frindly advies on what to look out for.
Time is an important value for authentification and other things and the reason to ensure from the beining it's working in your setup. Deploying Citrix Netscaler in a High Availability (HA) paair is very common, especially when we are talking about the VPX editions. First thing you should ensure is that the time between both Netscaler are in sync.
Let's start with there should be an Option in the Internet Information Service (IIS) application settings to set the default domain and hide the entry. It's really not that hard, so I don unterstand why Citrix isn't doing it.
Here a short description how to permanantly set your domain and then hide the domain filed from the Citrix Director logon page.
