Citrix

Citrix Cloud Connector Installation

Introduction

In this post I am going to introduce a topic I will covering in a few posts over the next few weeks.  At the moment there is big changes going on in the IT Industry in regards to how we work driven by Cloud Computing.  When Cloud computing was first introduced I heard lots of people saying that companies are going to go 100% into the cloud and quietly sniggered to myself as having worked in large Enterprise IT environments for over 15 years I knew this would never happen.  A few companies have managed to pull it off with massive re-organisation and obviously any new companies starting up today are trying to adopt a cloud first model.

Over the past 18-24 months the Hybrid model seems to be gaining traction and companies are using it to dip their toes in to see what benefits this new operating model can give them. One company which seems to be leveraging this quite well is Citrix. I was intrigued when they introduced Workspace Cloud but never really looked into it much as the adoption rate seemed to be quite low.

However, more recently they renamed their Workspace Cloud to Citrix Cloud and it seems to be maturing quite nicely. I have managed to sign up to a 60 Day trial so I shall be having a play to see how it integrates with On-Premise, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. 

Test Number 1 is going to see how it can integrate with On-Premise so over the next week I shall document the steps to get this all setup and working and then next week move onto Azure or AWS. So here goes!

Step 1:  Install the Citrix Cloud Connector

We can think of the Citrix Cloud Connector as the gateway between your On-premise environment and the Citrix Cloud.  When we install any VDA’s this is what we will point them to. 

The only requirements are: (taken from http://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-cloud/citrix-cloud-connector/technical-details.html)

  • Net: .Net 4.5.1 or later.
  • Active Directory (AD): Join the machine to an AD domain that contains the resources and/or users for the assignment to service offerings (Active Directory schema versions 2008 R2 and later are supported).
  • Networking: Connect the machine to a network that can contact the resources in the Resource Location. These resources provide the services. The machine must have a connection to the internet.
  • Make sure the clock on the server has the correct UTC time. Otherwise, you cannot connect to the cloud.

First of all sign in to your Citrix Cloud account and from the menu select Resource Locations

image

From there select Download to download the executable for the Citrix Cloud Connector

image

Once you have downloaded the Cloud Connector, run the installation and you should be prompted for your Citrix Cloud credentials. Once you have entered your Citrix Cloud credentials the installation should continue and register your Connector automatically

imageimage

Once the installation has finished it will run a connectivity test which will test the connectivity from your connector back to your Citrix Cloud account

imageimage

Hopefully your test will come back all green!  And that’s pretty much it!  Citrix recommend you have at least 2 servers running the Cloud Connector for redundancy reasons. 

If you now go into your resource menu you should see that the connection is now showing as registered

image

And if we head back to the main menu we should see that the Resource Location and Domain menu’s are showing as 1.

Now that we have our Active Directory domain registered with Citrix cloud the next step will be to register a VDA which I will cover in the next post. Till next time!

image

Smile

3 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *