Citrix XenDesktop 7.15 LTSR: Introduction

Course Overview
Hey, this is Greg Shields, and you've found the first course in my learning path on Installing and Managing Citrix XenDesktop version 7. 15 LTSR. I am author evangelist and a full-time author here at Pluralsight, and I've been building, managing, and helping others with Citrix environments since the days this product was known as WinFrame. Whether you're new to Citrix or have worked with its many versions, you're aware of how large and complex a beast any XenDesktop implementation can be. Very different from other solutions, you almost have to know everything about XenDesktop to truly appreciate, well, anything about XenDesktop. It's for that reason that this learning path breaks apart the topics in installing and managing XenDesktop into one course for each of its major components. In this first course out of seven, I'll be introducing Citrix XenDesktop 7. 15 LTSR, Citrix's second long-term service release for XenDesktop. We'll discuss these courses' very subtle alignment with the CCA-V and CCP-V certifications and explore the virtual machines you'll want to build if you plan on following along. If you've just been tasked with building a new Citrix XenDesktop environment, this course is your first stop in brushing up on those skills for success. And then from here, you'll be ready to continue on the learning path as we explore Delivery Controller, Machine Creation Services, Provisioning Services, StoreFront, Receiver, and NetScaler, Policies and Profiles, and Citrix Director. Let's get started.

Build Your Lab Environment
Now I know I tend to learn by doing, and actually learning all these technologies has done, at least for me, by actually playing with them in a lab environment. And so while I'll be walking through over the next many hours all these different demonstrations, it can be useful or really most important to follow along in your own lab. For this purpose, I want to get you started with the virtual machines and also the networking configurations that will be necessary so you can build that lab environment. You can assume that other than building these virtual machines and then creating an Active Directory domain and joining them to that Active Directory domain, that's really all you need to know in order to get started. And so let's talk here about what we'll be discussing in this module in terms of building exactly that lab environment. For this I want to show you the virtual machines you'll need to build. Again, these are right out of the box, patch them, network them, add them to an Active Directory domain that you'll need to create, and then I also want to talk about the virtual network infrastructure that I'll be using here in my environment. As I said, you can use whatever hypervisor, typically a type 2 hypervisor, but really whatever suits your fancy. I myself tend to use VMware Workstation, and so here in the third item I'll be showing you, at least for VMware Workstation, how you go through some of the configurations, including the special network configurations that we'll be working with.