Xenapp 6 seems to be a tricky little customer to install, when following the instructions from the administrators guide I was receiving random failures but all pointing me to helpfully look into a certain %userprofile% directory in order to view the details. The log file always contained nothing but the most generic of information that really is not of any help.
Then I discovered something. the administrators guide “lies” it says that xenapp will look for missing components and install them as needed (except .net 3.5 which was a pre-req) but it does not.
If your xenapp is on a VM, make liberal use of snapshotting ( i did this before installing any roles just to make sure). So in order to install “xenapp 6 fun” you will need to do the following:
1/ Build a clean server 2008 R2 server and DO NOT INSTALL ANY UPDATES (I included av into my fix just to make sure).
2/ Add to AD and create a xenapp service user account
3/ Add the following roles.
4/ .net 3.5 (application server)
5/ IIS 7 (web server)
6/ Remote session host and licensing server (RDP)
7/ then run the xenapp setup program as administrator, you should be able to install it without any issues. If something goes wrong revert you vm snapshot back to the point before you installed any roles (so you have basically a clean new server without having to reinstall the OS).
After the install has completed and you have set up xenapp as you would like it, create another snapshot and start installing AV and updates, check xenapp for functionality at each update to make sure nothing bad happens (if it does just revert to previous snap shot and don’t install that update).
Thanks for sharing. I’m ready to throw my trial out the window lol. Their documentation is all over the place…some say no Windows Data Center, others say thats fine. Says it will prompt to install 3.5 .NET but doesn’t. Ugh.
Such a pain, had to move to a virtual server because the second it fails you have to reimage the disk.