Q. What's a Worker Group in Citrix XenApp 6?

A. Worker Groups are new in Citrix XenApp 6. They're collections of XenApp servers that reside in the same farm and are managed as a single unit. Worker Groups let you collect servers into groups for publishing applications, load balancing, and policy filtering. They're particularly useful for larger installations where many XenApp servers must be managed as a single unit.

Worker Groups can be created based on each server's Active Directory Organizational Unit (OU) membership, or a Worker Group membership can be specifically assigned to each server in the Citrix Delivery Services Console.

By combining XenApp's ability to stream applications to XenApp servers with the configuration control in Citrix policies, Worker Groups make it feasible to add a barebones XenApp server to an OU and see it be automatically configured and provisioned with the Worker Group's applications. Using applications that have already been prepared for streaming delivery, this capability can significantly decrease the amount of time required to deploy new XenApp servers.