One of my favorite features of XenApp 6-- Worker Groups. Worker Groups allow you to "silo" your XenApp servers based on their purpose, the applications they publish, etc. When publishing an application, you can select individual servers to publish from as you normally would, or you can select from Worker Groups.

The biggest benefit of Worker Groups is that they can be populated dynamically, allowing simple but rapid scale-out capability.

Once created, there are 3 ways to add servers into a Worker Group; add the servers manually, set the Worker Group to use an Active Directory Security Group, or by setting the Worker Group to use an Active Directory OU. The latter two are done dynamically, with the method using the OU being my personal favorite.

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The BEST use of the Worker Group feature is witnessed when paired with Citrix Provisioning Services to deliver XenApp server images-- to physical servers or to virtual machines. The idea here is pretty slick-- you build your "golden" image with your desired applications installed and configured, convert the image into a vDisk, and provision away.

And because Citrix PVS can be set to join the newly provisioned servers to the domain and into a specific OU in your Active Directory, a Worker Group based on that OU will automatically add the server in.

So a simple example here would be to build a vDisk image with Microsoft Office installed, and within the Delivery Services Console publish Outlook to the "Office" Worker Group, which for the sake of this example we'll say uses an OU called "XenApp Office".

As Provisioning Server spits out the new servers joined to the domain and in the XenApp Office OU, they're automatically added into the Worker Group. Outlook is immediately published from them, and they're added into the farm to be load balanced across as with any other XA server there.

Rapid, super-scale capability-- and with PVS, minimal storage footprint. 300 more users coming online Monday morning? No problem, just provision the appropriate number of servers and grab yourself a cup of coffee.