Automation of Citrix infrastructure and deployment of Citrix on AWS and Azure. by Guillermo Musumeci, Citrix and Cloud Architect

1. Guillermo Musumeci
Citrix and Cloud Architect
Automation of Citrix
infrastructure and
deployment of Citrix
on AWS and Azure.
Paris, December 1, 2014

2. 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)

3. 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).

4. Who I Am
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.
Author of books "Getting Started with Citrix
XenApp 6” and “Getting Started with Citrix
XenApp 6.5”.

5. 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

6. 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.

7. After some serious
Automation …..
(and hundred of hours
of coding….)

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. The born of CtxAdmTools
Screenshot of the
first and ugly web
site of
CtxAdmTools
from September
25th, 2008.

11. CtxAdmTools Today
Development of tools for:
• Active Directory
• Citrix
• Cloud (Azure/AWS)
• Splunk
• Virtualization (XenServer, Hyper-V and vSphere)
• Windows

12. 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.

13. 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!

14. 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)

15. 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.

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

17. Citrix Tools - CtxAnalyzer
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

18. Citrix Tools – CtxConsole
Managing multiple
versions of Citrix XenApp
farms using one single
console from any server or
desktop.
Currently support XenApp
4.5 to 6.5

19. Citrix Tools - CtxConsole
Real-time Server
Performance Monitor.
Check the CPU and
Memory utilization of
Citrix XenApp servers in
real-time.

20. Citrix Tools - CtxConsole
Save 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.

21. Citrix Tools – CtxConsole
Smart 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.

22. Citrix Tools - CtxDiscovery
Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental….

23. Citrix Tools - CtxDiscovery
Scan your
machines and
create the
inventory of
your Citrix
servers on
multiple farms
from
MetaFrame XP
to XenApp 6.5

24. Citrix Tools - CtxDiscovery
Do 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

25. 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)

26. 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.

27. Citrix on the Public Cloud – The Beginning
However, none of these
sentences were true.

28. Citrix XenApp on AWS Quick View
Source: blogs.citrix.com

29. 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).

30. 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.

31. Provisioning of Citrix Workers
To 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.

32. 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).

33. 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.

35. Merci beaucoup !
Questions?
www.twitter.com/ctxadmtools
www.linkedin.com/in/musumeci
www.ctxadmtools.com