How to Manually Configure an Organizational Unit in Active Directory for use by XenDesktop

Summary

This article explains how to manually configure an Organizational Unit (OU) in Active Directory (AD) for use by a Citrix XenDesktop farm. XenDesktop requires that all virtual desktops and the Desktop Delivery Controllers be domain members. This manual process is an alternative to using the Citrix Active Directory Configuration Wizard. This OU is known as the farm OU. It contains information about the farm and the Desktop Delivery Controllers available to virtual desktops.

Requirements

A tool to access and manipulate Active Directory is required to follow the steps in this guide. Microsoft ADExplorer is recommended because it provides an easy way to create objects and set their properties. ADExplorer can be found here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963907.aspx

Procedure

How to Manually Populate the Farm OU:

The following steps create the basic structure of the farm OU that leave it ready to register and unregister Desktop Delivery Controllers. Once these steps are complete, the farm OU should have the following structure:

‘Farm Name‘(OU)

     Farm SCP (SCP)

     Controllers (Group)

     RegistrationServices (Container)

For some information on using ADExplorer to perform the steps outlined in this document, refer to the ADExplorer documentation.

Create the farm Organizational Unit:

Create an Organizational Unit in AD at any level; the name can be anything. This is the OU for a single XenDesktop farm. It is not recommended farm OUs are created as children of other farm OUs.

Create the farm Service Connection Point:

1. Create a service connection point in the farm OU called Farm SCP.

2. Add the following individual entries to the keywords property of the service connection point. Note that ****** refers to the farm name chosen at the start of the first Controller install.

Citrix Systems Inc
CC071D3E-773B-A7C1-BC8979313FAE
XDFarm:******
XenDesktop
54AFB4D3-4736-881E-421C4DA1EAAC

Create the farm Controllers Group:

Create a security group in the farm OU called Controllers. Typically the scope of this group should be set to Global, however, the scope of this group is important and must be set according to the following:

• The functional level of the AD forest

• Which domain the OU, controller accounts, and desktop accounts reside

The following table illustrates the supported scopes—the bold entries indicate the recommended scope.

Create the farm Registration Container:

Create a container in the farm OU called RegistrationServices.

How to Manually Register a Desktop Delivery Controller:

The following steps register a Desktop Delivery Controller for use with the XenDesktop farm. The farm OU must have already been configured to complete the following.

Add Membership Details:

Make the controller machine a member of the Controllers group.

Create a Controller Service Connection Point:

1. Obtain the value of the ‘objectGUID’ property of the controller machine. (This is easily done with ADExplorer by highlighting the machine in the AD tree and double-clicking the objectGUID property in the property list. However, the value must not include the braces { } that encapsulate the
value).

2. Create a service connection point in the RegistrationServices container with the name being the objectGUID value obtained in the previous step.

3. Grant the controller machine permissions to update the new service connection point. The following permissions are required:

List Contents
Read All Properties
Write All Properties
Read Permissions

4. Add the following individual entries to the ‘keywords’ property of the service connection point. Note that ****** refers to the farm name chosen at the start of the first Controller install.

Citrix Systems Inc
CC071D3E-773B-A7C1-BC8979313FAE
XDFarm:******
XenDesktop
0A1988B8-9B6F-4CA0-BBA4-6C7BD4D020B4

5. The farm OU must be registered with the Desktop Delivery Controller. This can be done on the controller itself using the following command line.

Note: ****** refers to the distinguished name of the farm OU. This is the ‘distinguishedName’ property of the farm OU and is in the form ‘OU=My Farm,DC=MyDomain,DC=com’

C:\Program Files\Citrix\Desktop Delivery Controller\ADSetup.exe REGISTEROU OU=”******”

6. Restart the Citrix Desktop Delivery Controller Service on the controller.