Machine Creation Services (MCS) is a single image management solution from Citrix that allows you to easily create multiple virtual machines based off a gold Virtual Machine by performing thin or full linked clone copies of a master virtual image.
StoreFront as the Default IIS Page and optimizations
The option to make StoreFront (pre SF3.5) Receiver for Web the default page/document in IIS simply does not exist within the StoreFront console like it used to back in legacy Web Interface. What I mean is that if I was to browse to my StoreFront server via https://storefront I’d get the iisstart.htm IIS 8.5 page.
Optimising the Citrix Receiver experience
You know what a lot of people do when installing products. They install a product, configure the minimum settings to get it working, walk away once it’s working.
The same applies to products such as XenApp & XenDesktop. Most of the time we publish applications and desktops to StoreFront with little to no extra configuration.
I think although we don’t need to use them, we should atleast be aware of some of the tweaks you can make. I will describe some briefly below, beginning with Workspace Control.
Citrix PVS Synthetic NIC streaming with Hyper-V
As of August 2015, Hyper-V machines come in the form of Generation 1 and Generation 2 (Hyper-V shipped with Windows Server 2012 R2). Generation 2 brings some advantages over Generation 1 such as standard (synthetic) NIC PXE booting capabilities, UEFI firmware support and booting from a SCSI attached VHD. These are some things a Generation 1 VM cannot do.