Designing a basic XenApp architecture

Let's learn more about Brick Unit Constructions. The HQ of the company is located near Frederick in Maryland. The company had around 120 users working there. Currently, they have 17 sites under construction around the state located in a 150 mile radius of HQ. Each of these sites has 10 to 25 computers, accessing applications installed on the site server or in each user computer. So we have around 400 users between HQ and the construction sites. Almost 20 percent of these users utilize laptops, work on a few projects at the same time, and travel between sites. All these sites are connected in a MPLS network between HQ and sites using T1 links.

Usually these projects are short-term, between six months to two years. When the project is completed, IT department needs to take a full back up of every machine and the server and reassign them to a new project.

None of these sites has its own IT personnel, so the management of these servers and computers (backups, install new applications, printers, and so on) is centralized from HQ, making the administration very complicated.

Users with laptops are having issues with printers and access to files located on different servers. William wants to resolve these issues moving all data in remote file servers to a centralized file server on a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device, and migrate all printer queues located on remote sites to a new printer server on HQ. The migration of printers will help him to clean up print server drivers and check the compatibility of current printers with XenApp.

The other issue these users are having is related to an in-house developed financial application installed on construction site servers. Users must have these applications installed multiple times (one per site).

The following diagram is the Brick Unit Construction's current infrastructure:

William is concerned about the following:

William's idea is to move all applications installed on a client's machine or servers in remote sites to a XenApp farm, migrate all data in these sites to the HQ file and print servers, remove servers from field, and reuse them (these servers are pretty new) to build more XenApp servers or virtualization hosts to run XenApp on virtual machines.

Moving all applications to XenApp will help IT to reduce the license cost of applications and simplify the deployment of new versions and manage applications centrally.

Centralizing all data in a NAS file server will help to reduce backup cost (hardware and software) and simplify administration. Also, it will reduce the time required to restore information.

Currently, the most popular option to implement XenApp 6.5 is using virtual machines and William decided to use it for the deployment of Brick Unit's farm. We are going to learn how to implement XenApp on virtualized environments in Chapter 14, Virtualizing XenApp Farms.