Citrix Receiver and Merchandising Server: Test Drive
Citrix has been to list a number of products, to use them you need to install a number of client components. Citrix Receiver and Citrix Merchandising Server are two products designed to manage all your clients, and their distribution.
Citrix Merchandising Server is a distributed exclusively as a Virtual Appliance for Citrix XenServer. This is obviously a reasonable limit, even though you can use the free version of XenServer. However it means to dedicate a physical server to install XenServer in all those organizations that do not use the Citrix hypervisor. Fortunately, the virtual appliance is based on a Linux distribution and then you can also retrieve the latest hardware technologies without Intel-VT or AMD-V, as paravirtualized kernels do not require hardware virtualization.
The good news is that the virtual apliance only need an import of virtual machine and after 10 minutes (the time right for a coffee) are ready to go with the configuration. The first thing to do is configure the network parameters using the console: 
A simple menu allows us to configure IP address, Netmask, Default Gateway and DNS servers. Saving the configuration, and so on. At this point we connect to our virtual appliance using a web browser and proceed with the basic configuration.
The virtual appliance is configured to respond https, so during the first connection will receive a warning from the browser for the incorrect certificate. The starting address is https:// <ip_address> / appliance / Which brings us to the login screen. 
For the first time you must use the default user root with its default password C1trix321. Of course, we will immediately change the default password, because you can not delete or rename this user!
Then you must set the connection parameters to allow Active Directory users and groups access to our domain. For the configuration, you must provide the address of a server (preferably global catalog), the LDAP port (best of the Global Catalog), the Distinguisced Name of a user on AD for authentication and password in addition to the Base DN to go to pull users and groups. Only after completing this stage you can configure the "Permission", ie users who have enabled the administration of the Merchandising Server, or privileges of auditors (read only) and with full privileges. 
The first phase of setup is complete. We can go out and connect with one of the users Active Directory that we configured for the PHASE of the virtual appliance.
The login page is always the same, but this time we can access slept with our user Doman \ with the name or UPN. The new page is much more feature rich. We can complete the configuration of our virtual appliance loading a proper SSL certificate and configuring any proxy server for internet access. 
At this point begins the actual use of the Merchandising Server: Plug-ins under the heading -> Get New you can view the list of available plugins (not yet installed) and for each download the installation file and the file metadata (which contains the parameters for installation). Then we load the plugins directly on the appliance by selecting Plug-ins -> Upload and insert the file you just downloaded. Finally, under the heading Deliveries, we can configure the deployment in a test environment or production by specifying users and / or groups that distribute new versions.
From the desktop, just open the browser and connect to our appliance <FQDN> http:// / to be redirected to the download page of the Citrix Receiver. The FQDN is required to not receive certificate errors when connecting.
Once installed the Citrix Receiver asks only the data for authentication and then proceed with the installation or upgrade of the client available for that specific user. 
Currently the following plugins are available:
- Citrix Online App (ICA Client)
- Citrix offline app (Streaming Client)
- Citrix Accelerator (WANScaler / Receiver)
- Citrix Communications (EasyCall)
- Citrix Secure Access version 9.0 (NetScaler VPN client / Agee 9.0)
- Citrix Secure Access version 9.1 (NetScaler VPN client / Agee 9.1)
It is not (yet?) Available Secure Access Client is compatible with the Access Gateway Standard / Advanced.
We come now to some considerations. The product is extremely interesting for QUALLI companies that have offices where the management of software distribution is always problematic. With the continuous release of updates and new products, the need to update the client components is becoming more frequent and Merchandising Server becomes the ideal tool.
The choice of the Virtual Appliance for XenServer may seem restrictive, but it is justified by a number of reasons. It is unthinkable that Citrix distribute and maintain a Virtual Appliance to a competitor's product (as well as his own, his main partner, Microsoft), while the installation physical environment surely would introduce high complexity of installation. Hopefully in the near future, the virtual appliance is at least compatible with Hyper-V.
The product is not intended for use on the Internet, since there is not the ability to manage ACLs for administrative access, even if technically possible.
A little 'baffling system requirements: Citrix recommends that you assign to the VM and well 2vCPU 4GB of memory. Citrix Merchandising Server can also run with much more limited resources (I conducted the tests with 1 vCPU and 1GB of RAM), but for use in production is better to keep the specifications.
The only real problem I'm experiencing is related to Citrix Receiver, which does not recognize any Citrix components installed are not compatible. In my case it was an error in the verificatto Citrix Online plug-in because the computer was installed an older version of the Citrix Desktop Receiver. For this reason, before installing the Receiver may be advisable to remove previous versions of the client.
Other articles on similar topics:
- Citrix Receiver and Merchandising Server releases Windows version 1.1
- Citrix Receiver and Citrix Merchandising Server for Windows
- Online Citrix Receiver Plug 13 and 3.0 on Windows
- New Citrix client for Mac OS X: Online Plug-in 11.2, the Access Gateway Plug-in 1.2.0.58, 2.0 Receiver
- ICA Client for Mac OS X: Citrix Online Plugin for Mac 11.1, 1.2 Receiver
- Citrix Receiver for iPhone, still update
- Citrix Receiver for Windows Mobile releases version 11.0
