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The Citrix Lifecycle Management official launch enables a hands-free installation of Lakeside SysTrack to any Citrix environment

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Back in August, Citrix announced the long awaited Citrix Workspace Cloud technology along with the associated Lifecycle Management  tools. The blogs by my friends Kailas Jawadekar and Joe Vaccaro explain these stacks in detail, but here’s the gist the way I see it:

Workspace Cloud adds the ability to manage Citrix environments (XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, etc.) from a cloud-hosted control plane. Gunnar Berger has a few videos out that explain the concept. The key to this technology is a new cloud connector that allow your environment to communicate with the Citrix hosted consoles. Why would you care, you might ask? Because at some point, you might wish to have multiple Citrix deployments in disjointed networks, or have a portion of your infrastructure or session hosts in a private, public, or hybrid-cloud. Rather than introducing more complexity in the configuration and management, workspace cloud gives you the ability to manage all these otherwise independent environments centrally.

So far so good.

Many of you, who have been managing dynamic datacenters for a while, are pretty familiar with the concepts of virtual machine templates, Provisioning Services golden images, and similar tools that helps you to “build once, and deploy many times”. These approaches, however, are not entirely without challenges as these templates are often closely bound to the specific hypervisors you wish to use and are not easily re-usable across all instances of hybrid clouds. That’s where Lifecycle Management comes in. Think of it as an automation / scripting engine that allows you to define all software installation and configuration steps that have to be performed to turn an plain  OS image into the workload you desire. This is called a Blueprint in LCM parlance and I have written about the concept in a recent blog.

Well, today is the day that we’re ready to announce that we have developed and published a Citrix Lifecycle Management Blueprint for the SysTrack master server, which is the central component of any SysTrack deployment. It is available for you by logging into manage.citrix.com and selecting the Blue Print Catalog. You will see the Lakeside SysTrack blue print in the partner section and you can simply add it to your library by clicking on the little ‘+’ symbol on the bottom right.

The SysTrack blue print takes your standard Windows Server 2012 base image and then automatically downloads and installs the SysTrack master server along with all its technical pre-requisites. After the blue print has been deployed successfully, all that is left for you to do is to request a SysTrack license from us and deploy the agents to your workloads. These can of course be other Citrix infrastructure or session hosts in your hybrid cloud, but also general server and desktops, including the physical machines that you already have.

The SysTrack Blue Print for LCM simply allows you to add the award winning success platform for end user computing to your environment without having to manually install and configure an additional server.

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