Plan your deployment. Citrix Hypervisor. Citrix Provisioning. Google Cloud. Machine Creation for Azure or Azure Government. Machine Creation for Citrix Hypervisor. Machine Creation for Google Cloud. Machine Creation for Hyper-V. Machine Creation for vSphere. MS Azure or Azure Government. MS Hyper-V. Nutanix AHV. VMware Horizon View in vSphere. VMware vSphere. Network File Share other platforms. Install appliance. Access management console.
Change administrator passwords. Set up file share. Connect to a directory service. Citrix Provisioning. Google Cloud. Machine Creation for Azure or Azure Government. Machine Creation for Citrix Hypervisor.
Machine Creation for Google Cloud. Machine Creation for Hyper-V. Machine Creation for vSphere. MS Azure or Azure Government. MS Hyper-V. Nutanix AHV. VMware Horizon View in vSphere. VMware vSphere. Network File Share other platforms.
Install appliance. Install agent. Access management console. Change administrator passwords. Set up file share. Connect to a directory service. Assign roles. Enable Labs features. Collaborative Work Management. Boost Productivity Support employee well-being Enable a hybrid workforce Transform employee experience. Small business. What is Citrix Workspace? Citrix Workspace. Download Citrix Workspace app Citrix Workspace app is the easy-to-install client software that provides seamless secure access to everything you need to get work done.
Empower every worker with one intelligent, flexible workspace. Support Downloads Community. Any availability strategy for App Layering must fit into the overall availability and recovery design for the whole workspace solution. Storage can be made highly available in different ways. Most use a storage array with a high degree of redundancy including multiple storage processors or heads and RAID technology. Of course, many vendors also have a solution to provide high levels of storage redundancy using local storage virtualized into a SAN.
The key is to determine what works for your organization from a complexity, cost and availability standpoint while understanding the availability provided by your solution. Networks can also be made highly available fairly easily because hypervisors are designed with a substantial amount of availability in mind.
But it is important to take advantage of this to ensure you have at least two network paths available to each MM in your environment. For App Layering, there are several components that can be used in the solution including:. The App Layering appliance is a Centos based virtual appliance. This appliance hosts the App Layering console, all App Layering logic and the App Layering database which includes the definition and settings for all connectors and layers. The appliance is also where the layer library is stored.
The layer library is just a virtual disk broken into several folders to store OS, App and Platform Layers. Note: Platform layers are stored with App layers. The great thing about this design is that everything about layers is stored in the appliance. If the appliance is backed up you have a significant part of the App Layering infrastructure available for recovery. Images created by the ELM are published into the format and location required by the provisioning system.
Elastic layer assignment is controlled by several json files stored on the elastic share and the user layer share is assigned by AD group again based on json files in the elastic share.
The ELM appliance is used to create layers, layer versions, and layered images. It is also used to deploy elastic layers to the elastic layers share and configure the json files used to assign layers to users. The appliance also has one or more large virtual disks used to store layers. The ELM appliance should be backed up via some type of virtual machine backup to storage that is different from the storage used to store the appliance. Most organizations will use their normal VM backup solution.
If no whole VM backup is available a good solution is to make a clone of the appliance after shutting it down. This can be done manually or scripted. Backup products that support change block tracking would be preferred due to the size of the layer repository. This will not help if the storage is damaged but will certainly help if the appliance VM files are damaged or a user error happens.
For example, deleting many layers due to miscommunications. This is currently a manual process but layers can be exported to a share and imported to another appliance from that share. Connectors and image templates would have to be recreated manually if suing this method to sync appliances.
Elastic Layers are layer mounted just before logon from an SMB share. Using App Layering both management and upgrades for images are simplified with no direct editing or reverse imaging of images. Decouple the apps and provisioning systems from the image: Citrix App Layering separates packaging from the image. In normal image management updates to an image are performed for each image separately. Using App Layering a layer can be part of many images. To update all the images the layer would be updated once, and the images regenerated.
Supports complex use cases: Complex applications with kernel drivers, systems services, third-party drivers, and console access can all be supported using Citrix App Layering. A user logs on to a desktop most write operation goes into the User Layer.
It allows a user to install applications and save configuration settings that are outside the user profile. Reduces the number of required images: Elastic Layering can significantly reduce the number of required images by dynamically delivering applications to only assigned users at logon.
App Layering is an important addition to the Citrix technology portfolio that provides many benefits listed above. Though it provides benefits, App Layering does not mean to use it for all the use cases. In this section, several of the most relevant use cases are outlined to show the benefits of App Layering technology. Many Citrix customers must support a significant number of applications and a complex set of user requirements. When using an image-based provisioning technology, meeting these requirements often requires a high number of images to manage.
These images have to support different user groups or different sets of conflicting applications. Often there is some overlap in the applications deployed to each image as well. App Layering allows the administrators to manage the operating system and applications as individual entities using layers. For example, Windows needs to be patched, the patch is made to the OS layer once and all the images that use OS layer updated by the App Layering appliance.
If Microsoft Office is used in 10 images, upgrading this Office is simpler by adding a version to the Office layer. Eventually all those 10 images are updated automatically.
When Elastic Layering is added, it is also possible to significantly decrease the number of required images. Elastic Layer allows the admins to dynamically deliver applications during log-on.
For applications that are not used by everyone, Elastic Layers allow the image to be created more generically while providing customization for each user.
Many organizations are moving to a hybrid multi-cloud environment mixing on-premises and cloud resources to enhance the user experience. Citrix App Layering provides image portability by supporting most hypervisors plus Microsoft Azure simply by creating a different Platform Layer for each desired environment.
Normally a mixed hypervisor and hybrid cloud configuration would force the administrators to maintain multiple different sets of images and applications in multiple different management platforms.
With App Layering technology, the same OS and applications used on-premises can be pushed to the cloud or to another hypervisor with little to no extra work. Also, companies often merge with other organizations that have made different technology choices.
One of the distinct advantages of App Layering is the ability to move from one platform to another simply by creating a different Platform Layer and migrating the App Layering appliance using import export to the new platform.
Allows for a seamless migration, for example, from vSphere to Citrix Hypervisor or from an on-premises hypervisor to Azure. Many organizations have several users that require a high level of persistence on desktops.
Including power users in any group, developers, engineers, architects, and so on. App Layering User Layers provide a significant amount of persistence on top of a pooled desktop architecture. The User Layer is mounted on logon and any subsequent writes on the desktop are written to the User Layer.
Most applications can be installed in the User Layer. The rules for what works in the User Layer are the same as for Elastic Layering.
As long as the application does not install kernel drivers, third-party drivers, and the services that are dependencies to other services during boot, they are the most likely work in the user Layer. For use cases that require persistence, the User Layer is the best choice. All of these solutions now handle managing the Outlook OST, Outlook streaming files and Outlook index files so that supporting indexing is no longer a reason to choose one technology over another.
A Layer is a virtual disk containing the files and registry entries that are changed or added during packaging. Excluding the first version of the Operating System layer, layers are created by the App Layering appliance integrated with the hypervisor. An administrator creates a layer, the appliance dynamically provisions a packaging machine with a boot disk and a layer disk. When the packaging machine boots, all changes on the packaging machine are written into the layer disk.
When packaging is complete, this disk is copied back to the appliance and all the files and registry changes are written into the new layer and stored in the layer repository in VHD format. Platform Layer: The platform layer includes the software required to support a particular platform.
Including the broker agent, provisioning system, and hypervisor tools if the hypervisor is different from the default hypervisor. The platform layer is also the highest priority layer and sometimes software is installed here so that it is compiled at the highest priority. User layers: An elastic see next section writable layer. User Layers are mounted at logon and once mounted almost all the desktop writes go to the user layer.
This layer gives users the ability to significantly customize their VDI experience even though they are using a shared desktop model.
The Citrix App Layering appliance appliance provides both the administrative interface for App Layering and the engine for all App Layering processes.
The App Layering appliance is deployed as a virtual machine into the data center where application packaging and image publish take place.
These settings are not to be changed as the appliance is designed to work in that configuration. The appliance is built with two disks. The first disk is a 30 GB boot disk for the operating system. The second disk is the GB layer repository.
This disk can be extended or expanded as necessary if more space is required. During the process of layer creation and image publish, the Citrix App Layering appliance saves virtual disk files in VHD format to its layer repository within the appliance.
The appliance interfaces with an SMB share to support the appliance upgrade process and for storing Elastic Layers. The appliance is used only to manage layers, images, and Elastic Layer assignments. Virtual Desktops and Virtual App servers do not interface directly with the appliance.
When a layer is assigned elastically, the appliance copies the layer to the Elastic Layer share. Deploying the App Layering appliance is the first step in the installation process. After installing the appliance, the management console is accessed to complete the installation steps.
Learn more about installing the Citrix App Layering appliance, refer to the product documentation. The Citrix App Layering management console is a web-based application hosted on the App Layering appliance. The App Layering management console provides the interface to:. New to version and later is a feature called Compositing Engines. Compositing Engines offload most of the packaging and publishing tasks that can also be performed by the App Layering Appliance.
By offloading these tasks the packaging and publishing processes scale much better and due to the advantages of the technologies used, performance of the process is also significantly enhanced.
A Compositing Engine is built by a Hypervisor connector as a Windows PE virtual machine that carries out a set of publishing tasks, then reboots itself into a packaging machine or published image. The Compositing Engine is used to create cached layer disks, create packaging machines and publish images. At the time of writing of this reference architecture, there are Compositing Engines for HyperV and vSphere introduced in versions and , respectively.
Use of Compositing Engines is a choice. The significant advantage to the Compositing Engine is that it is running on a Windows device with direct access to hypervisor disks.
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