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Citrix CC-VAD-CC study materials
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Citrix CC-VAD-CC: Deployment and Installation (Delivery Controllers, StoreFront, Director, VDA)

Citrix CC-VAD-CC · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

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Deployment and Installation (Delivery Controllers, StoreFront, Director, VDA)

Installation order matters because each tier validates the one below it: AD, DNS, NTP and certificates first; then SQL; Citrix Licensing; controllers and Site creation; StoreFront; Director; the VDA (usually baked into a master image); finally catalogs and delivery groups.

Controller and Site

Create the Site from Studio on the first controller; the wizard creates the Site, its databases and the default administrator. Every additional controller joins the existing Site-re-running the Site wizard instead of joining creates a second, isolated Site. Kerberos time skew beyond five minutes breaks controller and VDA authentication and later shows up as registration failures. Citrix Licensing listens on 27000, with the Citrix vendor daemon on 7279.

VDA silent install

A typical master-image command: VDAServerSetup.exe /quiet /controllers "ddc1.corp.local ddc2.corp.local" /enable_hdx_ports /enable_hdx_udp_ports /noreboot

  • /controllers populates ListOfDDCs; always use FQDNs, never IP addresses.
  • /enable_hdx_ports opens the local firewall for ICA/HDX; omitting it yields sessions that connect but never display.
  • /noreboot is required in image pipelines; add /masterpvsimage for PVS targets or /remotepc for Remote PC Access. The VDA initiates registration to the controller, so outbound TCP 80/443 must be open from VDA to controller-not the reverse.

StoreFront and Director

StoreFront installs IIS plus the Citrix Delivery Services. Bind a certificate whose SAN contains the exact URL users type, create a store, add the controller farm, then add the Gateway if external access is required. Director installs on a controller or standalone and needs the Monitoring database for trends.

Worked example. 500 desktops from one image: install the VDA on the master with the command above, snapshot, create the MCS catalog, then confirm with Get-BrokerMachine -RegistrationState before building the delivery group. If machines show Unregistered, check the ListOfDDCs value, DNS resolution and time before touching StoreFront.

Traps

  • Installing the VDA on a Delivery Controller.
  • Opening the controller firewall inbound but not the VDA outbound rule.
  • Certificates with a CN only and no SAN-clients fail before authentication.
  • Re-running the Site wizard instead of joining an existing Site.