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I’ve always been a firm supporter of IT automation since I joined this industry. Maybe I’m a bit biased because by day and night I’m all about automation, but I think it should be a requirement in all IT departments. This is one of the most effective ways a company can cut costs and it allows engineers to focus on the tasks that really matter.  There’s absolutely no reason why some of the most common, repetitive, and mundane tasks we face in the IT world should not be automated in every organization… especially installing software!

One of the projects I’ve led at Citrix was the development of an automated test to validate the XenApp installer. My experience from this project and past jobs has given me a good amount of knowledge in automated software deployment strategies that can be applied to XenApp.

In this blog, I’ll outline four of the options you can choose from when determining an automated deployment strategy for XenApp (specifically mps.msi). I’ll publish one option each day, which means the last one will come online Wednesday… perfect because on Thursday I’ll be on vacation in the Caribbean sipping on a pina colada!

If there is significant interest in this series, I’ll consider writing a follow-up entry to cover the other XenApp components. Please note that I will not go into the nitty gritty details of how to implement each solution, I’ll leave that to the Admin Guide. However, I will give an overview of each approach and some of the cool perks they offer. Before you install XenApp via these methods, you should ensure your system has the necessary prerequisites installed, which you can find on pg. 48 of the Admin Guide.

So, let’s talk about our options:

Script-based Installs with MsiExec

Running MsiExec on mps.msi in silent mode is one of the most primitive yet powerful ways to install XenApp. This method gives you direct access to the MSI and is the basis for the other options we’ll be discussing later. The main disadvantage here is that you have to specify your install options on command-line. This can get complicated very quickly for an installer like XenApp that allows a lot of customization (not to mention casing and spelling has to be spot-on for some of the MSI parameters). Pg. 369 of the Admin Guide talks about the details in case you’re interested in learning more.

In order to develop a strategy with this method, you will need to use some type of third-party automation tool such as Altiris or SMS. For example, by leveraging Altiris you could create a job, select your base OS image, key in your MsiExec script, and be on your way to automatically provision your servers with XenApp.

The majority of the automation I work on at Citrix take this approach (minus Altiris, we have our own automation framework) since the tests are typically interested in validating the installer itself and not some third-party components. I should also note this automation is used to test our daily builds against small farms and is in no way, shape, or form run in a production environment. With that said, most XenApp environments can still be successfully rolled out by pairing this method with third-party tools like Altiris, as it gives you the most flexibility and control. However, if you’re looking for something that’s simple or have special environment considerations you need to deal with, some of the other options I’ll be talking about may suit you better.

Stay tuned for Part 2!