Citrix releases XenDesktop 7.5 Windows Azure Pack Gallery Image Tech Preview
Citrix has released the XenDesktop 7.5 Windows Azure Pack Gallery Image which enables rapid and repeatable XenDesktop deployments. The automation capabilities of Windows Azure Pack are leveraged to greatly reduce administrator involvement with XenDesktop configurations.
The Citrix XenDesktop Windows Azure Pack Gallery Image is targeted towards Citrix customers who have deployed or in the process of deploying XenDesktop 7.5 and also use Windows Azure Pack for delivering infrastructure and application services within their organization.
XenDesktop Gallery Image Requirements
The import and use of the Gallery Image for XenDesktop is dependent on the following resources:
- Windows Azure Pack (and its dependencies)
- Server 2012 or 2012 R2 operating system disk image prepared with sysprep
- XenDesktop media prepared as a virtual disk
- XenDesktop 7.5 Windows Azure Pack Gallery Image download package
- Accessible from the download sections at Citrix.com. Select ‘XenDesktop’ as the product and ‘Betas and Tech Previews’ as the download type.
- Prepare objects in your SCVMM Library as outlined
How it works
Windows Azure Pack integrates with Microsoft System Center and Windows Server to help provide a self-service portal for managing infrastructure and application services. It supports modeling and managing a distributed enterprise application as a unit rather than as individual machines.
After an administrator imports the Gallery Image and makes it available to a plan; a Windows Azure Pack Tenant can provision an entire XenDesktop infrastructure by deploying from this single template. This template instantiates the various server roles of a XenDesktop deployment as service tiers and supports adding capacity to support additional desktops by scaling out the necessary tier.