This brief post will cover the basic components of the new Citrix XenDesktop 7 and how they fit together.
The Delivery Controller acts as the central command center for the XenDesktop 7 environment. It manages users access where users connect to it and through it they access desktops and applications. Each Site has at least one or more Delivery Controller. The delivery controller connects to Hypervisor (XenServer, vSphere, Hyper-V) through MCS (Machine Creation Services). MCS basically translates the commands between the Delivery Controller and the Hypervisor to create the Citrix infrastructure. There is another method to provisioning the Citrix assets and that is through Provisional Services (PVS). PVS use is more advantageous than in MCS due to the machine being provisioned the moment it is booted up when using PVS. The PVS through PXE service or DHCP can enable any machine to receive an operating system at the moment it boots up.The machine disk will be located on the SAN. The advantage gained with PVS is a disk-less environment. PVS can provision not just VMs, physical machines but also hypervisors which means one delivery mechanism for the whole infrastructure.
The Storefront Server is a website/web service where users will connect to get authenticated and access the infrastructure (the desktops and applications resources) that are associated with their account. It is best described as the main front door door that users use to get into the store (environment).
The license server is where all these components acquire their license.
Citrix Studio is the management console that enables the administrator to create, configure and manage the XenDesktop and XenApp resources. The Citrix Studio is design for high level administration of the environment.
Citrix Director is a web based service that is used for the daily tier-1 type administration where admin monitor and troubleshoot the XenDesktop environment.
So far these are the main components for the Citrix infrastructure located inside a LAN. However, for outside access we need add another Citrix component, Citrix Netscaler. Netscaler sits between the LAN and the DMZ and it is capable of many tasks, such as proxying traffic between users on the internet and the XenDesktop 7 infrastructure within the LAN. Netscaler also are used for load balancing, acceleration, authentication and encryption.
The Citrix Receiver is a client that is installed on the end user client device so the user can receive the desktop and applications from XenDesktop.
This post was a quick high level view of the new XenDesktop 7 components.
Thank you for reading.
Nick