During a recent customer engagement deploying Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 to 4000 users across EMEA, we came across an issue for a group of users that had a requirement to access a Citrix Metaframe XP farm hosted on a W2K server to access some legacy apps hosted by a third party.To meet this requirement we used something called ICA Piggyback.
So what is ICA Piggyback? Essentially, it allows us to use a double hop process to bounce from one farm to another allowing us to make use of different ICA client versions.
I published an ICA file from our XenApp 6.5 farm to the specific group of users, however we had complaints that when the published desktop was maximised to a full window the session would disconnect. Also if the user left the desktop as a window, the session would randomly disconnect at random intervals even when the desktop was in use.
The desktops published from Citrix XenDesktop were running Citrix Receiver 3.3, so I started to investigate the issue by ensuring we had met current supported levels.
A quick look at the receiver documentation showed the target destination was unsupported, not surprising really….
Figure 1: Citrix Receiver 3.3 System Requirements
My first approach was to contact the third party to see if it was possible to access the legacy applications on a supported platform, to no avail. Therefore, it was back the drawing board.
I started searching through the Citrix documentation looking for a client that supported both W2K and Metaframe XP, eventually finding the XenApp Plugin for hosted Apps version 11.0.150.5357.
Figure 2: Citrix XenApp Plugin System Requirements
After finding what was going to be client for the job, I had to figure out how I could get this client to the users. After some head scratching, I figured I had two options, package the application, or deploy it out from a XenApp server and use a piggyback method.
We had a number of Citrix XenApp 6.5 servers available in a farm, yet I didn’t want to install such an old client on these servers in case I lost any functionality going forward. We had a separate requirement to host some legacy IE6 applications, so I deployed out a small Citrix XenApp 5.0 farm hosted on W2K3 R2.
After a number of functional tests for performance and stability, this allowed for smooth connections from a hosted desktop, running Citrix Receiver 3.1 passing through a XenApp 5 farm, into a Metaframe XP farm.
Whilst this is not a permanent solution it does provide a handy workaround and functionality to a number of users whilst the final legacy apps are retired and replaced.