Publishing Applications from Individual Servers in XenApp 7.x

Last Updated on January 22, 2020

Back in XenApp 6.5, publishing applications from Individual or a specific servers in Citrix XenApp was not a big deal but Citrix discontinued that along with other options in XenApp 7.x (7.0 – 7.11). In XenApp 7.12, Citrix resurrected that option but not exactly similar to 6.5.

You might have been using Tags to create Power management schedules, restricting desktop launches to certain machines within a Delivery group or to filter Citrix Policies based on tags attached to Virtual Machines. Now you can leverage tags to force applications to open only from tagged machines within a Delivery Group with the help of Application Groups.

Suppose, you have a Delivery group containing Production as well as Non-Production servers. You are tasked to publish Beta and Production version of an application from that Delivery group. How would you ensure that Beta Application opens up from Beta Server and Production Application would launch from Production Server? You certainly, can create two delivery groups for Production and Non-production servers but in my consulting practices, I do not recommend that because each application that needs a dedicated server will require two delivery groups – one for Production load and another for Non-production load.

For the demonstration, I will use the Delivery Group with one server for Prod and one server for Beta.

1. Select the first server
2. Click on Manage Tags in the right column
3. Click on Create in the Manage Tags window
4. Give tag a Name. Mine is SPS Beta
5. Give tag a Description. I am using the same as name
6. Click on OK
7. Confirm the tag you just created is ticked
8. Click on Save
9. In the Details section of the server, you would notice that server has been successfully tagged.
10. Repeat the steps for the 2^nd server i.e. production

11. Click on Applications on the Left in Studio
12. Click on Create Application Group in the right column
13. Click on Next

14. Check “Restrict launches to machines with tag”
15. Select the tag (SPS Beta)

16. Select the Delivery Group. Notice that selecting the tag filtered 1 out of 2 machines. It means all applications published from this Application Group will be launched only from the server(s) that are attached to the Tag we selected in 14^th step
17. Click on Next

18. Add user groups who you want to assign applications published from this Application Group

19. Add applications just like you normally do in a Delivery Group. Click on Next

20. Give Application Group a Name and Description (optional) and then click on Finish.

21. Repeat the steps for the second server.
22. At this point, you should have two Application Groups, each of them restricting application launches to only tagged server(s) within a single Delivery Group.

Visit “How to Assign Applications to Specific Servers in XenApp 7” written by Martin Zugec to understand different approaches that you can take for your application publishing using Tags, Application Groups and Delivery Groups.