This post is a continuation of the previous 2 posts where I am walking through the steps to get a Citrix Cloud service setup and running. We have already covered the Citrix Cloud Connector installation and connecting an application server with the VDA Agent installed to our Citrix Cloud Service.
You can find these posts here:
- https://itsolutionsdirect.com/citrix-cloud-connector-installation/798/
- https://itsolutionsdirect.com/citrix-vda-agent-for-citrix-cloud/824/
This post will cover the configuration of the Delivery Groups and then we will assign an application hosted on our on-premise Application server and ensure we can connect to it using the HTML5 Receiver using the Cloud hosted StoreFront server.
So the first step is to sign into your Cloud Service and create the Delivery Group as you normally would do.
In this step, notice that there is a new option here. It says “Leave user management to Citrix Cloud, this makes the Delivery Group available as a Library offering you can assign to users”.
So what is the Citrix Library? It is basically a one-level view of all the services that a user can subscribe to. It can consist of apps, desktops, data shares and web apps, basically any service that is Created in the Citrix Cloud. You can view more info here https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2016/12/05/the-library-in-citrix-cloud/
So in this step the Citrix Cloud is communicating with my on-premise Application server to retrieve the list of applications that are available. For this test I have chosen the trusty notepad application 
OK now we have the delivery group created but we do not have any applications assigned to us as of yet. Notice that the Users tab says “Managed by Citrix Cloud”
If we head back over to our Citrix Cloud Service menu we should see an option for Library and you can see a list of the available applications
Now we can assign an existing user from our on-premise Active Directory domain to the application, just as we would in a normal environment
So now that we have assigned the application to the user we can then log into the Cloud Service hosted StoreFront and see that we have the Notepad application assigned to us
You can get to the StoreFront page by going to https://subscription.xendesktop.net/Citrix/StoreWeb
And we are then able to launch the application using the HTML5 Receiver. You can also use a standard receiver but I wanted to test the HTML5 functionality, and it works great!
And if we head over to the Director screen we can also verify that we can see the application being used in there
And that’s it for now! In summary I am very very impressed with the Citrix Cloud service. It has been extremely easy to get it up and running and anybody could do it in literally 30 minutes. Good job Citrix!
Over the next few posts I am going to explore more integration options through NetScaler (cloud and on-prem) and also integration with Azure/AWS/Google Cloud.
Till next time!