All Forums experts,
I wanted to do a research on some of the popular tools available in the market for Provisioning of servers. My immediate responsibility is Citrix servers as I manage our Citrix farm here.
I was hoping I can tap your expertise in finding out:
a) What to look for in a Provisioning tool, besides the obvious.
b) What are the pitfalls when provisioning Citrix servers, so i can do a thorough test with the tool(s) during my POC.
c) Is there any whitepaper or document that is available where someone has already done a similar research.
Thank you and looking forward to hearing from the forum members.
Cheers and Thank you in advance!
I have been provisioning XenApp from Quest vWorkspace and Citrix Provisioning Server (CPS), on VMware and XenServer respectively. Still not sure about how well/if 2008 is supported, but 2003 is rock solid. As for the tools, vWorkspace integrates well into VMware and it's Customisation Manager using SysPrep and CPS integrates well with XenServer, of course... using SysPrep as well. The pitfalls that I have seen are: Failure to clone Sysprep, Post SysPrep errors, can leave you with a Server down or one that is not 100% fully prepared. SAN iSCSI performance can be impeded when provisioning in production. Making sure that the templates are updated with the latest patches and AV, especially if using nonpersistent disks.
Not sure if I have seen good documentation out there, apart from manufacturers so I will be interested to see, but there are certain studies with XenApp on VMware and XenServer (read turf war), so it is a bit to marketing speak for me...
--Emil