Deploying Citrix XenApp in Microsoft Azure

Once deployed, I was supposed to receive an email with my login info and URL so I could access the POC’s NetScaler Gateway.  I never got that email so I had to hunt and peck to try to figure out what URL to use.  After several attempts to use the Azure-specific DNS name (https://myxenappid.westus2.cloudapp.azure.com) to access the POC and getting nothing but “your logon has expired. Please log on again to continue” messages, I performed more sleuthing and identified the proper URL (https://myxenappid-westus2.xenapponazure.com) via this blog post on citrix.com.

After downloading the Citrix Receiver and logging in, I was provided access to a handful of apps, including the Citrix Director and Citrix Studio tools.  With that, I jumped into the Citrix Studio app and published a few other low-ends apps just to “kick the tires”.  After publishing Notepad, WordPad, and Calculator (my “go-to” apps when testing app publishing in XenApp), I refreshed my Citrix Storefront and found that they were made available to me as expected:

Now that I knew the apps worked, I wanted to see how easily I could push them out to my workstation’s Start Menu and Desktop.  To do so, I went into the properties of each app and clicked the “Add shortcut to user’s desktop” checkbox.  After doing so, I launched my Citrix Receiver app, logged in, and refreshed my apps.  With that, my apps suddenly appeared on my Desktop and in my Start Menu.

Awesome sauce…  It worked.

I did not get into a ton of testing (still on my to-do list) but considering what testing I did complete, I was happy with what I saw.  In addition, because everything in the POC is deployed in a single Resource Group, killing everything off was as simple as deleting the resource group.

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Thomas Mitchell

Tom is a 20+ year veteran of the IT industry and carries numerous Microsoft certifications, including the MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure certification. A Subject Matter Expert in Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange, Tom also possesses expert-level knowledge in several other IT disciplines, including Azure, Storage, and O365/Exchange Online. You can find Tom at his website, on LinkedIn, or on Facebook. Need to reach him by phone? Call 484-334-2790.