Citrix Application Streaming Is Not Dead in XenApp 7.5

Prior to the release of XenDesktop 7 organizations had a choice of using Citrix Application Streaming or Microsoft App-V.  My organization opted for Citrix Application Streaming early with the release of XenApp 4.5 circa 2007.  App-V had yet to be included with RDSH, Citrix Application Streaming didn't require any additional infrastructure and later when we were dabbling with XenDesktop we reaffirmed our decision as we weren't licensed for MDOP.  We invested countless hours creating 100s of streamed apps and we did it again migrating apps from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2.  Citrix Application Streaming was easy, it worked and it worked well.

We should have seen the writing on the wall...

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The Death of Streaming from Citrix?

...but we were reaffirmed by Citrix that Application Streaming was here to stay.

We had a roadmap meeting with Citrix prior to the announcement of XenDesktop 7 and Citrix gave us the bad news.  They told us it was too difficult to rewrite the Citrix Application Streaming filter driver for Windows Server 2012 & Windows 8.  I've always felt disappointed by this as the same team that developed Application Streaming also developed User Profile Manager (UPM) and they used a similar filter driver for profile streaming.  Needless to say, we've begun the transition to migrate applications to Microsoft App-V 5.0.  My only regret is we should have migrated to App-V during our transition from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2, but hindsight is always 20/20.

I'll stop griping now and demonstrate how to use Citrix Streaming Applications with Citrix XenApp 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2.  This process will only work on platforms that are supported by the Citrix Offline Plug-in and Citrix XenApp 7.5, i.e. Windows Server 2008 R2.

Similar to previous releases of XenApp the Citrix Offline Plug-in is required to be installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Citrix XenApp 7.5.  The latest release (as of October 2013) are available as limited release hotfixes from the links below.

Citrix Offline Plug-in 6.7.3 (CTX138394)
Citrix Streaming Profiler 6.7.3 (CTX138395)

To publish the Citrix Streaming Applications use the command line options for raderun.exe.  raderun.exe by default is installed to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Streaming Client".  The command line options can be viewed by running "C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Streaming Client\raderun.exe /?".

At minimum /app and /package options are required, depending on the application /extracmdline may be required too.

In Citrix Studio select "Add Application Manually", for the "Path to the executable file" browse to RadeRun.exe and enter the "Command line arguments" for /app, /package and /extracmdline.  /app should match the shortcut name from the Citrix Streaming Profiler.

For example to publish Firefox the command line argument would look something like this.

/app:"Mozilla Firefox" /package:"\\server1\Firefox\Firefox.profile" /extracmdline:"www.citrix.com"

This example is similar to the Citrix XenApp 6.5 "Streamed to Server" option and does not address "Streamed to Client".

Although this is an option for organizations who may have numerous Citrix Streaming Applications I would only recommend this practice as a temporary solution as they migrate to Citrix XenApp 7.5 and Microsoft AppV 5.0.