Nutanix Acropolis with XenDesktop: 8 simple steps

2 min read

Kees Baggerman·Senior Technical Director at Nutanix – Former Citrix CTP – NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor – 15+ years in EUC

All posts →

As I was going through cycles to deliver our next Reference Architecture for running Citrix workloads on Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor I realised that I didn’t capture the full steps to run Citrix XenDesktop on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor so this blogpost is have a workflow ready to make sure that you have all the steps covered to do a successful deployment.

In a fully integrated stack you can follow the reference architectures from Nutanix and Citrix and Reviewer guides from Citrix (which I strongly recommend reading as there is a lot of valuable information in these guides) but at this point in time Citrix XenDesktop on Acropolis Hypervisor has limited integration so I wanted to capture the high level steps to configure Citrix XenDesktop for Acropolis Hypervisor.

1. Create a Master VM/Golden Image following your specifications (don’t forget to optimize your image)!
2. Install the Citrix VDA configured to your XenDesktop Delivery Controller(s).
3. Clone your Master VM/Golden image using ACLI.
4. Create an unattended.xml that matches things like your AD domain name, username/password combinations, language settings etc.
5. Run Sysprep as Microsoft requires an unique SSID per VM in MS Active Directory
   
6. Create a Machine Catalog and add your unmanaged VMs to that machine catalog.
7. Create your Delivery Group and provide access to your users to this delivery group.
8. Configure Citrix StoreFront to provide access to these desktops.

In a simple visual it comes down to:

The thing that stands out here is the fact that the automated provisioning isn’t included, that’s something we’re working on and to of course there are multiple ways to do the sysprep, so we started on some starting points on how you could achieve do sysprep in a programmable way:

• ‘Mass’ sysprep your Windows VMs for Nutanix AHV
• Setting up Citrix XA/XD with an Acropolis Hypervisor cluster

Hopefully this will help you in configuring your environment to fully utilize the power of Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor for your Citrix XenDesktop and/or XenApp environment.

Keep an eye on my blog for future integration as we’re about to show you more of our integration plans and I might be able to provide an early sneak peak.

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

Latest posts by Kees Baggerman (see all)

• When the Orchard Ships Production Software: AI-Augmented Development in the Real World - May 17, 2026
• Nutanix Documentation Script v5.0: Visual Reports, Brand Templates, and Seven Embedded Diagrams - May 15, 2026
• Nutanix AHV and Citrix MCS: Adding a persistent disk via Powershell – v2 - November 19, 2019
• Recovering a Protection Domain snapshot to a VM - September 13, 2019
• Checking power settings on VMs using powershell - September 11, 2019

Kees Baggerman

Senior Technical Director at Nutanix - Former Citrix CTP - NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor - 15+ years in EUC

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

X / Twitter LinkedIn GitHub Email