Technical Interview Questions for Citrix Engineer

Q1 - You have been asked to reduce the time on Citrix support calls, by making sure your Citrix XenApp 6.5 farm is “Citrix Support Ready” and already has the proper tools installed before contacting Citrix, what is the main tool you would install?

 Citrix Scout

Q2- You will be migrating from XenApp 6.5 to XenApp 7.6, what are two differences between IMA and FMA?

Some answers include: FMA uses Sites and no longer utilizes Zones or Zone Data Collectors, FMA uses Virtual Desktop Agents (VDA’s), FMA leverages MCS for Servers and Desktops, IMA uses Local Host Cache (LHC), IMA uses IMA Service.

Q3 - You have been tasked to come up with an Active/Active GSLB scenario for your Citrix XenDesktop environment. What are some underlying factors you should consider during your research and planning phase?

You want to make sure you have a working way for data replication, including profile replication between the two sites. Microsoft does not support two way replication for their profiles. You will also need to make sure you have a way to disconnect sessions from each site. It is best to use Active/Passive with manual failover in this scenario.

Q4- You are creating a XenApp/XenDesktop environment and your manager asked you to optimize your profiles without using a third party solution. How would you accomplish this?

 Citrix has User Profile Manager, which will allow you to streamline your profiles and leverage Microsoft folder redirection.

Q5 - You are migrating your Citrix environment from a 2003 OS to 2008R2 OS, and you want to make sure your current applications will run correctly on the 2008R2 OS. What software or utility does Citrix provider you help you make sure your applications will be compatible on the 2008R2 OS before the migration?

 Citrix AppDNA

Q6 - How does Citrix Netscaler licensing differ from the other Citrix product licensing?

 As an appliance or hardware, Netscaler is separate from most other Citrix products that use a license server. It is licensed independently.

Q7- Can you name two of the services required to be running on the Provisioning Server for it to function?

 SOAP and STREAM services must be running on the PVS Servers

Q8 - What are the two most common ports used on XenApp ICA sessions? What are each used for?

Ports 1494 (ICA/HDX) and 2598(Session Reliability)

Q9- What is the Role of the XenDesktop Controller?

 A controller is the server-side architectural component of XenDesktop that is responsible for distributing desktops, managing user access, and optimizing connections.

Q10- You manager has requested you to come up with a way for your helpdesk to monitor and troubleshoot your XenDesktop/XenApp 7.x environment, without adding on a third party solution. What built in Citrix functionality would you use to do so?

Citrix Director Enables level-1 and level-2 IT Support staff to monitor a XenDesktop deployment and perform day-to-day maintenance tasks. You can also view and interact with a user's session, using Microsoft Remote Assistance, to troubleshoot problems

Q11.- You are architecting a Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) deployment which will be placed across different datacenters via a WAN link. You only want the PVS disks to be streamed in each local datacenter and not cross over the WAN. What feature in PVS would you use to accomplish this?

Subnet Affinity

Q12- What is the major financial bottleneck of any VDI deployment?

 Storage. Traditionally, storage has been very costly in getting a comparable VDI end user experience as opposed to the local desktop experience. There are several vender solutions on the market now to address this. Hint: You may want to have them mention some of these solutions as well.

Q13) - You are preparing a PVS master target device which is created on VMware vSphere virtual hardware version 10 or higher. What must you do with the CD/DVD Rom setting for PVS to work correctly?

You will need to change the CD/DVD Rom to IDE instead of SATA. SATA is not supported in PVS.

Q14) - Citrix StoreFront displays applications differently than Web Interface. Instead of having all accessible applications appear on the home screen, first time users are invited to choose (subscribe) to the applications they want to regularly use after they logon. What function in Storefront must you use to avoid users having a blank screen and automatically subscribe users to a few core applications when they first logon?

 Keywords

Q15) - What free tool from Citrix will allow you to analyze your log files, profile your Citrix environment, scan for known issues and attach a log file to a Citrix support ticket.

Citrix Insight Services or TaaS

Discussion Based Questions:

Q16- What is the newest version of XenApp you have worked with and tell me a little about your work on it?

Q17) - Explain a difficult challenge you had with XenApp and or XenDesktop and what you did to solve it?

It should be fairly simple for an experienced person to come up with something.

Q18) - What is the latest version of XenDesktop you have worked with and explain a little about your work on it?

Q19) - Explain what you do to keep up your professional development?

You are looking for blogs, training (if they are willing to get training on their own, without relying on an employer), video’s and a biggie is home lab. There is not a good excuse in today’s climate for an engineer or architect not to have either a home or cloud based lab if they take their career seriously.

Q20) - If you were tasked to architect a Citrix XenDesktop 7.6 environment, what would be some of the questions you would ask the business, so you can design a technical solution?

You want to see if they know how to start with a business outcome and work backwards into the technology. Good signs are, asking specific business related questions such as: How do you envision the end goal, what are you trying to accomplish?, What is the importance of this project to the business (If highly important, that leads into DR questioning about RTO and RPO and the such?