Lab: Part 34 – Configure Site Aggregation for Citrix Workspace in Citrix Cloud with XenDesktop 7.x located on-premises

Configure Site Aggregation for Citrix Workspace in Citrix Cloud with On-Premises XenDesktop 7.x.

In this article, we will review how to configure the Site Aggregation feature in Citrix Cloud to aggregate your on-premises XenDesktop 7.x applications in Citrix Workspace. The feature is currently in tech preview and available in Citrix Cloud.

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What is Site Aggregation for Citrix Workspace?

Until the release of Site Aggregation for Citrix Workspace, the only options available to customers who wanted to use Citrix Workspace was to use XenApp and XenDesktop Service or Azure Quick Deploy from Citrix Cloud to manage Citrix workloads. But that is the past! Citrix has released a tech preview of Site Aggregation for Citrix Workspace. This new feature allows customers to link Citrix Workspace (located in Citrix Cloud) with on-premises Citrix XML brokers (XenApp 6.5 or XenDesktop 7.x). The advantage is that you are now able to use the fancy new Citrix Workspace UI and are still able to keep your local Citrix Delivery Controllers, Citrix Studio, Citrix Director and Citrix licensing and all your Citrix XenApp servers or Virtual Desktops located on-premises. Citrix offers the option to use its Citrix Cloud Gateway Service but you can even keep using your local NetScaler Gateway if you’d like.

That’s a major WIN for Citrix as the company now understands that some customers don’t want to move Citrix workloads in public clouds but are interested in using Workspace features in Citrix Cloud.

Note: there is a major limitation for in this tech preview. Azure AD is not supported.

Architecture

Getting started

In this article you will learn the following:

• How to install Citrix Cloud Connector on-premises
• How to configure Site Aggregation for Citrix Workspace in Citrix Cloud
• How to configure your Citrix Cloud applications and desktops for local identities
• How to disconnect from Azure AD

You need to have:

• A local domain (Ex: citrixguru.lab)
• Citrix Cloud Services configured (XenDesktop And XenApp Service or/and Azure Quick Deploy for XenDesktop Essentials)
• No Azure AD identity provider configured in Identity And Access Management

 

Configure Site Aggregation for Citrix Workspace

Note: Site Aggregation DOES NOT support Microsoft Azure AD.

For this post, I had to disconnect from Azure AD in Identity And Access Management.

Click on Disconnect. You can reconnect later.

The first step here is to install Citrix Cloud Connector in your local network.

Go to Citrix Cloud, in the main menu Select Resource Locations.

+ Resource Location.

Select Save to create the new Resource Location.

Then install Citrix Cloud Connector on your local server. The server must be able to reach Citrix Cloud, your local AD and your Citrix XML brokers.

Select the Resource Location previously created. Then go into Citrix Cloud and make sure that the communication is fine.

Note: Citrix recommends to install at least two Citrix Cloud Connectors for HA.

Go to Citrix Cloud, select Workspace Configuration in the left menu.

Select Sites (Tech Preview).

Select XenDesktop 7 (or select XenDesktop 6.5 if you are still running the unsupported version),

Enter the FQDN of one of your XML controllers. Citrix Cloud will be able to resolve your local network with the Cloud Connector software.

You will be prompted to authenticate with an account of your local domain.

Citrix Cloud will validate the connection and retrieve your XenDesktop site.

Next step is to validate the Active Directory connection.

Then the gateway. Here we will use the NetScaler Gateway Service that we configured in this post: Lab: Part 31 – Configure NetScaler Gateway Service for XenApp and XenDesktop Service in Citrix Cloud.

And voila! Site Aggregation is configured. Easy, right?

You can take a look at the configuration.

I was not able to add more than 1 controller at this time.

Then before testing, we need to make sure that we also have some Citrix Cloud resources published to local identities. For now most of the resources are published to Azure AD identities but that is not supported at this time by Citrix.

We can go in Azure Quick Deploy and add some applications to local identities. See below I added Administ[email protected] to some applications in Azure Quick Deploy.

And also publish a desktop to this user.

Go to your cloud.com Workspace.

Logon with your local domain account (Ex: [email protected]). You can see that applications are aggregated from Azure Quick Deploy, XenDesktop and XenApp Service and from your on-premises farm.

Same for desktops.

Try to connect to an app. Here I started Published Desktop which is an application located on-premises.

You can check in the properties of your session in Receiver or Workspace App that the session is proxified via NetScaler Gateway Service.

You can also configure Citrix Workspace Site Aggregation with no gateway. This would mean that your users will never connect from outside of your organization.

Select Internal Only.

 

See no gateway is present.

The session is open directly from the local computer to the local XenApp server.

The last option requires you to have a NetScaler Gateway on-premises to proxy the sessions.

Site Aggregation is a promising feature (for now in Tech Preview) in Citrix Cloud that allows customers to use Citrix Workspace via Citrix Cloud services without moving Citrix workloads into Azure or AWS. Customers can keep Citrix Controllers, Citrix Director, Citrix Studio and Citrix licensing locally and only use Citrix Workspace user-interface in Citrix Cloud.

Enjoy!

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