How do I deploy Awingu on an existing Citrix infrastructure?

Migrating away from an existing Citrix infrastructure to Awingu is one of our most frequent use cases. It’s actually a really easy and fast four-step process. We’re describing it below in full detail.

Note: There are a number of reasons why migrating from Citrix to Awingu is a good idea. We elaborate on this in more detail here.

Below is a picture of a typical Citrix XenApp Deployment:

Installing Awingu next to this setup can be achieved by deploying 1 (or more for load distribution or High Availability) in the Access Layer following this procedure which can be executed in less than 1 hour.

1)     Download and setup Awingu according to the regular installation guide.

Download the admin guide here

2)     Add non-admin users to directly access user group

When ‘Citrix Virtual Delivery Agent’ is installed on a machine, non-administrators can no longer RDP to the machine. A new local group called Direct Access Users is created on each Virtual Delivery Agent. Add your non-administrator RDP users to this local group so they can RDP directly to the machine.

– Enable non-admin RDP users to get direct RDP access –

Add here the security group for the users which should have access.

– Add security group for users with access –

3)     Enable RDP policy in Citrix studio

3.a. To be able to initiate a remote session a policy needs to be added to Citrix. Open the Citrix director and browse to the policy section. On the right top choose ‘Create Policy’

– Create new policy –

3.b. In the search field search for: ‘Launching of non-published programs during client connection’ and select it.

– Launching of non-published programs during client connection –

3.c. Enable this policy for all objects in this site

– Enable for all objects –

3.d. Give it a meaningful name and enable the policy

– Give a name and enable policy –

3.e. Set the policy priority higher

– Set policy priority –

3.f. If you want to speed the policy up you can always update them manually

– option: manually update policies –

4)     Optional: De-Install Citrix software from app servers

The result would be like in the following picture:

Please note that the Netscaler can be optionally used to load-balance to the different Awingu appliances but any load balancer will do.

There is no need any more of the Citrix Control layer. The Awingu appliances have all the knowledge needed to do the brokerage to the different RDS servers.

Have any questions or remarks? Please don’t hesitate and reach out to us.