Tying it all together

Designing and building a new Citrix environment involves a lot of moving pieces. For example, you cannot fully build StoreFront without having XenApp servers to connect for XML services, and you cannot launch applications until you build your XenApp servers and publish the applications. On the other hand, you cannot effectively test XenApp until you have StoreFront built and you can validate your applications. The same goes for NetScaler; do you define your load balanced servers first, or do you build your individual components first and then define your load balanced servers?

This creates a lot of chicken and egg problems. That is why planning is so important. At this point, refer to Chapter 3, Designing Your Infrastructure, particularly the reference architecture and the virtual machine planning spreadsheet. You can see that we laid out what we will do long before we do it. Since we know what will be defined where, we can build elements and define references to objects...