Printing in a Citrix^® world

Implementing a virtualized environment, such as Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, requires planning and design for various components of an infrastructure, including networking, storage, servers, applications, profiles, and much more, as seen in previous chapters. However, in the midst of deploying XenApp, sometimes, administrators and consultants tend to overlook the printing part just because it's working now. Clearly, as proven by the slew of support tickets I've seen and worked on during my time as a support escalation engineer at Citrix, this is an incorrect approach that often causes project delays and customer dissatisfaction. To avoid unnecessary issues and lengthy support calls, let's start by reviewing the fundamentals of printing in a Citrix environment, how it builds upon Windows concepts, what is changed, and what stays the same after moving to a virtualized system.

The fundamentals

XenApp 7.6 printing services relies heavily on the...