Integrating StoreFront into a Citrix Cloud Deployment

This post is a continuation of my previous posts into getting a simple Citrix Cloud Environment up an running and integrated with an on-premise environment as per this diagram:

(taken from https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-cloud/xenapp-and-xendesktop-service/technical-security-overview.html)

So far in the series we have gone through the following steps:

1) Installed and configured the Citrix Cloud Connector – https://itsolutionsdirect.com/citrix-cloud-connector-installation/798/

2) Configured the Citrix VDA Agent and registered a server with Citrix Cloud – https://itsolutionsdirect.com/citrix-vda-agent-for-citrix-cloud/824/

3) Created and configured the Delivery Group – https://itsolutionsdirect.com/citrix-cloud-delivery-group-creation/853/

4) Explored the scalability and performance of hosting services on-premise or in Azure –https://itsolutionsdirect.com/citrix-cloud-sizing-and-scalability/875/

The next logical step in this series is to implement the recommendations in Step number 4 which was to host StoreFront on-premise so that any AD Authentication is performed locally and the StoreFront servers are in close proximity to your clients. There are a few different scenarios which can be deployed which are discussed in more detail here: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-cloud/xenapp-and-xendesktop-service/setting-up-storefront.html

So let’s go ahead and configure our existing infrastructure so that our Citrix Cloud is able to communicate with our on-premise StoreFront servers and ensure that everything is working as it should.

1) I am starting with a fresh StoreFront installation which is latest version is 3.11. This can be downloaded from https://www.citrix.co.uk/downloads/storefront-web-interface/

2) Step through the installation as you normally would do for a normal StoreFront installation (which it essentially is!)

3) Select an appropriate Store name

4) Now this is the interesting bit. Where we would normally enter out Citrix Delivery Controller here we enter the name for the Cloud Connector. The Cloud Connector then proxies any requests onto the Citrix hosted Delivery Controllers over HTTPS.

5) Enter your authentication requirements, I am just using basic authentication for this test

6) Once you have gone through all your other configurations you should now have the Store configured and ready to test

7) The next test is to ensure that we can access the StoreFront page which we can successfully

8) When we enter our credentials we are authenticated against the local AD Controllers and then the Citrix Cloud service is queries for our applications which are then displayed to us and launched successfully. Once again an extremely painless installation and configuration.