Citrix XenDesktop 5 Training from TrainSignal

I had a, shall we say urgent, need to get up and running with Citrix XenDesktop 5 in a very short space of time. Having used some of the TrainSignal products before  and had a very good experience with them my first thought was to head over to their site and see if they had anything available. Thankfully, they have courses for both XenDesktop 4 and 5 so I was able to get hold of the XenDesktop 5 course. As with all the other courses you get both online access and a DVD with formats suitable for desktop / laptop and smartphone / tablets. (In this instance I only had online access, however was able to successfully stream the entire course to an iPad on 3G while on train journeys)

The topics covered on the course are listed below. Lessons 5 - 13 were those that I initally needed to get through quickly so focused on those and found that they covered well the significant part of what I needed to know.

Citrix XenDesktop 5 Training - Course Outline

Lesson 1 - Getting Started with Citrix XenDesktop 5 Training Lesson 2 - Lab Setup Lesson 3 - The Course Scenario Lesson 4 - Introduction to Desktop Virtualization Lesson 5 - Planning Provisioning Server Deployment Lesson 6 - Installing and Configuring Provisioning Server Lesson 7 - Creating vDisks and Configuring Target Devices Lesson 8 - Managing vDisks, Target Devices, Servers and Printers Lesson 9 - Configuring Provisioning Server High Availability Lesson 10 - Planning XenDesktop 5 Deployment Lesson 11 - Installing and Configuring XenDesktop 5 – Part 1 Lesson 12 - Installing and Configuring XenDesktop 5 – Part 2 Lesson 13 - Managing XenDesktop 5 Lesson 14 - Monitoring and Troubleshooting XenDesktop 5 Lesson 15 - Working with Citrix Receiver Lesson 16 - Working with Profile Manager Lesson 17 - Upgrading from XenDesktop 4 Lesson 18 - Preparing for the Citrix XenDesktop 5 Administration (A19) Exam Lesson 19 - Next Steps

Citrix XenDesktop 5 Training - Bonus Lessons

Lesson 20 - Configuring NetScaler Access Gateway Enterprise Edition Lesson 21 - Working with XenDesktop Setup Wizard

I’ve subsequently been through most of the rest of the lessons and found that it gives you excellent coverage of the XenDesktop product. I enjoyed Elias’ style of training; good explanations and he is always very positive about each lesson and the product itself.

The only thing I think is possibly missing from the course is that it would be worth a lesson on the XenDesktop PowerShell snapins. Since the entire management of the product is built on top of PowerShell it is worth knowing at least how to get started with this topic, even if you are using the GUI to demonstrate the rest of the training. An introduction to how to get started with the PowerShell snapins and a few basic examples would be a useful addition.

If you have a need to learn about XenDesktop then I would highly recommend that you consider using this course. I think TrainSignal have put themselves in a good place providing these two courses since in terms of book availability (which you could either view in terms of competition or complimentary) there are not many tech books available on this subject, although I notice that Elias has ‘Mastering Citrix XenDesktop’ scheduled to come out later this year.