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Book Review – Citrix XenDesktop CookBook Third Edition – #vDM30in30

So my second book review has been one I’ve looked to write for a while.

I had the chance to work with Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop in-depth as part of a virtualisation platform upgrade at a large educational establishment. Citrix is not my strong point, I’m more of a VMware person incase you hadn’t noticed.

This book was released as my project was coming to an end, after I had learnt the Citrix 7.6 product set from scratch, but I still thought it was worth a read. The author Gaspare A. Silvestri is a 10 plus year veteran with a heavy virtualisation background, and this isn’t his first Citrix Book!

Citrix XenDesktop Cookbook Third Edition Front Cover

The book itself jumps straight into how to install or upgrade an existing XenDesktop environment. It’s set out listing all the pre-reqs and then takes you step by step through the install process with screenshots as well.

After you have gone through the installing the various components, you jump into how to deploy VM’s, configure the policies and so forth. I had completed my project before this book was out, so I found it followed the same lines as the administrators guides from Citrix, but offered screenshots as aids. Where the book does better is the “There’s more…” sections, explaining caveats or hints/tricks for a particular component. Which really is what I was looking from the book.

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Personally I was disappointed a little by the layout, I would have liked some more architectural overview and diagrams at the start mapping out the Citrix ecosphere and how everything fits together, before jumping into the install and configure. Something which is present in “Mastering VMware Horizon 6” by Barry Coombs / Peter von Oven.

Overall the book is perfect for anyone getting into Citrix who doesn’t mind doing that extra bit of research, or those whom are looking at upgrading their environment, but didn’t necessary install it themselves. It’s just not the technical deep dive I was hoping for. But don’t get me wrong, producing a book of this scale covering so many components isn’t easy to do, so I’ve nothing but admiration for the hard work put in by Gaspare, with extra credit given for the fact he has a day job and being an author is secondary to this!

You can purchase the book from PackPub here.

Regards

Dean

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