Guru advice for a newbie! 1

[MattWray]

Hello,
I am very new to Citrix and just inherited a network running about 200 users on Citrix. We are looking at reloading Citrix due to some issues with the installer and what we've experienced afterward.
Things we should watch out for up front? Also we do not have the Enterprise license, only standalones due to cost. When we install, is there a way to either save user settings, or import them from one of the other servers? We don't want to have to log on as 200 users to set them back up if at all possible.
Also, what are the differences and/or pros and cons of looking into the Enterprise license...

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com

http://www.total-tec.com

 

[jdemmi]

Before you "re-load", what kinds of problems are you having with the installer? I had some issues with the Microsoft Installer on a few of our Citrix boxes (MS Term Server 4.0 and MF 1.8)....maybe I can help.

 

[MattWray]

Actually not the MS installer, the human installer that set up Citrix for us. The first time he loaded Citrix, he made the system unbootable. So he reloaded windows and started with all the reg hacks. But the 3 machines are supposed to be identical and they are not. One of them has no working help files, no matter what program you try and use it in. He would not supply us with the documentation that he used when editing the registry, so we would rather just reload one machine on the farm at a time, so we know what we have done.

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com

http://www.total-tec.com

 

[terrywilson]

Bad luck. Installing a Citrix server to a farm is quite straightforward. If you had the hardware there I would have to say you can't beat creating your own test farm (do it on a different subnet, or vlan it off). You are going to want to document as much as you can before beginning; what sort of Datastore, if SQL/ODBC etc what are the credentials for the datastore - things like that.

As far as user settings go, as long as you leave their profiles alone you should be fine (assuming apps go back in the same place).

Make sure you have a standard install location for each of your applications; ie, office always toes to E:\Program Files\Microsoft Office etc, then write it down as part of your site manual.

If you don't want to go the path of setting up a new test farm, it is pretty straight forward (backup the datastore incase you do something bad) to join a new server to the farm and make sure you can get your apps working on it. Then blow away all of the others one by one (Take care if you use the access data store to move it to another server first).

I assume you have setup roaming profiles for the users...

 

[MattWray]

Then am I right in thinking that the user profiles, reside in the database on the SQL server? Or are they locally on the citrix servers?
And no, we are not using roaming profiles. We could... Could you give me some pros and cons, as I do not have the final say in the matter...

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com

http://www.total-tec.com

 

[terrywilson]

The profiles are just standard user profiles stored wherever Windows sees fit. You don't say what sort of network you are running. Off the assumption that you have 2k Server, load up Active Directory users and computers and look at the properties for one of your users. You will find that under the profile tab you may or may not have a path set to the users home directory; ie \\server\username$\profile. If you run thin clients with just win9x or similar then I would ignore this and instead set a profile path for them under the Terminal Services profile tab.
This means they will be able to move around and their settings will be constant as they will come from a central location instead of locally cached copies under C:\Documents and Settings\username. The Docs and Settings one will still be there, but this is a locally cached copy of the users roaming profile from their home drive.

The idea of having a roaming profile is to have their environment consistent to them as they move around. They are useful because users are able to move between similarly configured citrix servers without changing anything or altering any of their details; ideal if you were adding another server ot the farm or removing one.

And as an aside the SQL store only contains information about the Citrix farm; published applications, administrators, user - app mappings etc.

As far as the version of Citrix to use, XPe has a few nice features (InstallManager) but they are very hard to justify for only a handful of servers. Stick with what you ahve got and you should be fine.

 

[MattWray]

One more question, with Roaming Profiles, will Outlook settings follow as well? Right now, we log on as a new user on all 3 server and set up Outlook on each. Not a big deal for one user, but setting up many can become quite a hassle....

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com

http://www.total-tec.com

 

[JohnTcolo]

Matt, as long as you are using Roaming profiles, the Outlook settings will follow. BTW, in our Farm we restrict the Microsoft core programs (Outlook, Excel, IE, etc.) to 1 server and use the others for our more critical apps. We do use extensive Load Management for these apps.

Hope this helps.