Automation of Citrix infrastructure

Guillermo Musumeci

Citrix and Cloud Architect

Automation of Citrix infrastructure and deployment of Citrix on AWS and Azure.

Paris, December 1, 2014

AGENDA

INTRODUCTION

PART 1 - CTXADMTOOLS AUTOMATION TOOLS FOR CITRIX AND WINDOWS INFRASTRUCTURE

PART 2 – DEPLOYMENT OF CITRIX ON THE PUBLIC CLOUD (AMAZON WEB SERVICES AND MICROSOFT AZURE)

Who I Am

Infrastructure Architect specialized in Citrix, Private and Public Cloud (Azure, AWS) and Virtualization.

+18 years of experience and PASSION for Microsoft, Citrix and VMware products.

Lived and worked in America (Argentina, USA), Asia (Singapore) and Europe (France, Spain).

Who I Am

Author of books "Getting Started with Citrix XenApp 6” and “Getting Started with Citrix XenApp 6.5”.

Design and implement Citrix solutions on the datacenter, private and public cloud (AWS and Azure) @ D2SI.

Founder and developer of website CtxAdmTools, dedicated to automation tools for AD, Citrix, Cloud, Windows and Virtualization.

What is Automation?

Automation: “Save a million clicks using a tool or script so you can return home early and enjoy life or spend more time on your favorite social network”.

Favorites automation categories:

• Automation of Administrative Tasks

• Automation of Provisioning/Orchestration of Machines

Why I Do What I Do?

• In 2008 I got a job in Washington DC, USA, to manage and support alone & 24x7 a very unstable farm with +200 Citrix servers in 3 datacenters.

• When I started my job, the company rebuilt 20% - 30% of the farm DAILY (and manually!!).

• Worked for almost 3 weeks, 18 hours/day x 7 days/week to stabilize the farm and automate the server build and some basic management tasks.

After some seriousAutomation …..(and hundred of hoursof coding….)

Results

• 3 months later I went from working 18 hours dedicated to support/management to 6 hours.

• I created tools to analyze the environment and search for errors early on the morning.

• 2 months later I reduced support/management load to less than 2 hours daily.

• I started to automate AD, Exchange and VMware.

The born of CtxAdmTools

I realized then that probably lot of people have same issues so….

In September 2008, I launched the site CtxAdmTools and started to share some of my tools with the Citrix community.

The born of CtxAdmTools

Screenshot of the first and ugly web site of CtxAdmToolsfrom September 25th, 2008.

CtxAdmTools Today

Development of tools for:

• Active Directory

• Citrix

• Cloud (Azure/AWS)

• Splunk

• Virtualization (XenServer, Hyper-V and vSphere)

• Windows

Automation Best Practices

• Do not hardcore IPs, hostnames, username and passwords

(Use get-credential in PowerShell).

• Document code properly (don’t forget dependencies!).

• Reuse code Create libraries or code repositories.

• Automate time consuming tasks and complex tasks.

Lessons Learned

• You can automate almost everything, but sometimes the cost

(time invested) is too high.

• Learn multiple scripting or high level programming languages.

• Automation is addictive.

• Share your tools, scripts and knowledge!

AGENDA

INTRODUCTION



Citrix Tools - CtxAnalyzer

All the info you need about your Citrix XenApp servers in one screen.

Compatible with

Citrix XenApp

4.5 to 6.5.


Multiple Citrix XenApp farms view. The perfect morning status report tool. Export results to Excel or HTML files.


Co-developed with Xavier Vilà Costa (@cloudxenapp)

Coming soon….

• New version of CtxAnalyzer with command line support so we can schedule farm reports.

• New CtxAnalyzerXD designed for XenDesktop and XenApp 7.x

Visit the CtxAnalyzer web site at http://ctxanalyzer.ctxadmtools.com

http://ctxanalyzer.ctxadmtools.com/

Citrix Tools – CtxConsoleManaging multiple versions of Citrix XenAppfarms using one single console from any server or desktop.

Currently support XenApp 4.5 to 6.5

Citrix Tools - CtxConsoleReal-time Server Performance Monitor.

Check the CPU and Memory utilization of Citrix XenApp servers in real-time.

Citrix Tools - CtxConsoleSave everything you see in the screen to Excel files.

Example: Export Servers of all Citrix Farms, Servers of one Citrix farm,Servers inside one folder or just one Server.

Citrix Tools – CtxConsoleSmart Server Filter:

Filter in real-time your Citrix XenApp servers:

• Physical or virtual servers.

• Online/offline servers.

• Operating systems.

Visit the CtxConsole web site at http://ctxconsole.ctxadmtools.com for more information.

http://ctxconsole.ctxadmtools.com/

Citrix Tools - CtxDiscoveryAny resemblance to reality is purely coincidental….

Citrix Tools - CtxDiscovery

Scan your

machines and

create the

inventory of

your Citrix

servers on

multiple farms

from

MetaFrame XP

to XenApp 6.5

Citrix Tools - CtxDiscoveryDo more in less time!

• Scan machines in AD/file list to create inventory of Citrix servers.

• Discover new (or old legacy) Citrix servers.

• Scan multiple Citrix farms from one console.

• Asset Management.

• Export inventory of all your Citrix servers to Excel file.

• Detect and fix license issues on your Citrix farms.

Visit the CtxDiscovery web site at http://ctxdiscovery.ctxadmtools.com

http://ctxdiscovery.ctxadmtools.com/

AGENDA

INTRODUCTION



Citrix on the Public Cloud – The Beginning

When I started the design of large Citrix XenApp 6.5 environments on the public cloud, I made some assumptions:

• The public cloud will reduce complexity of Citrix infrastructure.

• Building a Citrix environment on the public cloud is similar to build a Citrix environment on the datacenter or the private cloud.

• Public cloud makes it possible to spin up new Windows Server virtual machines in minutes and adjust usage based on the load.

Citrix on the Public Cloud – The Beginning

However, none of these

sentences were true.

Citrix XenApp on AWS Quick View

Source: blogs.citrix.com

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

• Design the Active Directory for a Multi-Availability Zones (AWS) or Multi-Region (Azure) network design.

• Use a File Server or NAS virtual appliances.

• SQL server running on virtual machines or database hosted on AWS RBMS or Azure SQL.

• NetScaler on AWS or Secure Gateway on Azure.

• On hybrid models, where should I deploy my Citrix datastore and license server?

• Citrix Workers provisioning (PVS cannot run on cloud).

Provisioning of Citrix XA65 Workers on AWS

(Too many) options:

• AWS CloudFormation templates.

• PowerShell CLI.

• Microsoft SCCM (hybrid mode).

• Custom AMI.

• AWS EC2 SDK Java, .NET …

• Citrix Service Provider Automation Pack scripts.

Provisioning of Citrix WorkersTo be DevOps, or not to be DevOps: that is the question.

• DevOps model works well for web instances and databases.

• DevOps spin and destroy Azure VMs or AWS EC2 instances daily using auto-scaling.

• DevOps don’t care about fixed IPs or instances names.

• DevOps almost don’t use Active Directory.

• DevOps use Puppet or Chef for automation. Puppet is a mix between JSON and Ruby. Chef is based on Ruby. Windows guys use PowerShell.

Citrix on the Cloud - Limitations

• Cloud Provisioning is very complex for XA6.5, better in XA7.x.

• Auto-scaling with Citrix components still not reliable.

• Multi-cloud deployment solutions nonexistent.

• Move workloads between cloud providers is a difficult manual process.

• No PVS support.

• No NetScaler in Azure (yet).

Citrix on the Cloud - Benefits

• Cheap disaster recovery solution.

• Publish new applications in minutes instead of weeks/months.

• Move costs from CAPEX to OPEX.

• Great for test and PoC environments.

• Elasticity – increase/reduce instances size with a reboot.

• Scalability – add/remove servers in minutes.

http://www.kopicloud.com/

http://www.kopicloud.com/

Merci beaucoup !

www.twitter.com/ctxadmtools

www.linkedin.com/in/musumeci

Questions?

www.ctxadmtools.com

Automation of Citrix infrastructure

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