Rebuilding Citrix Farm

[MatthewL]

We are currently in the process of moving to one data centre from two and currently have two Citrix farms but one has hardly ever been used and one heavily used. We have decommissioned the one not used much and transferred the few applications to the other farm whilst we build up a new one.

 

Now this is the first farm I have built my self but do have the hand of my line manager who build the original ones up but want to do as much of this on my own. What I want to know are there any tips for doing this? I am currently flattening the boxes and reinstalling Windows Server 2003 Enterprise R2 on them.

 

I have looked at what applications we have on them and which are used and which are not etc. We have a few specialised applications/databases which will be going on as well as some of our IT support tools for use on the patch and then Microsoft Office. I have been asked to look to put Office 2010 on but I am not sure how this will handle, has anyone tried it? We had Office 2007 on our IT terminal services box but ran like a dog so went back to 2003. We have no need to use Outlook and plan on just publishing Word and Excel on them. We have just moved to a national email system so users can use webmail for their email when out and about. Project and Visio get put on there as we have limited licenses of this.

 

Are there any recommendations on what I need to do and not do when building these up? I am trying to get as much of it off Citrix as I can as we now have better connections to sites than we did before and there is only a few applications that need to be put on there as its easier.

 

We have a group policy that locks these servers down so will be reviewing and updating this. Before the boxes have got to the stage where they all need rebooting as and when so want to try and sort this. Printing is always an issue for us as wells so need to look at this. We are going to have 4 or 5 boxes for use which will handle what we have so I am going to try and load balance across them all. I also need to lock them down to prevent engineers making changes to them which cause problems. In future I will be requiring a full RFC for any changes on the boxes themselves as we have a system that relies on Citrix to work so need to make sure no problems occur.

 

If anyone has any websites they recommend on Citrix it would be appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance.

[MatthewL]

Anyone?