Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp 7.5 / 7.6 Microsoft SQL Database Permissions

I’ve recently been asked a few times about what the database requirements were for Citrix XenDesktop and XenDesktop 7.5 / 7.6 and I thought I’d write a blog post so I could direct people to as well as reference it myself.

The supported database editions are as follows:

SQL Server 2012 SP1 – Express, Standard and Enterprise
SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 – Express, Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter Editions Editions

The supported redundancy and high availability database features are as follows:

SQL Server Clustered Instances
SQL Server Mirroring
SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups

*Windows authentication is required for connections between the Controller and the SQL Server database.

The information listed above are found at the following URL:

System requirements for XenApp 7.5 and XenDesktop 7.5
http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/xenapp-xendesktop-75/cds-system-requirements-75.html

For information about the latest supported database version, see CTX114501: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX114501

While I can’t find a specific requirements section in the Citrix eDocs that specify what the SQL Server database collation should be, the supported collation that should be used is:

Latin1_General_100_C1_AS_KS

Note that the Microsoft SQL Server instance does not need to be installed with this collation because the Citrix database can be set as such even though it differs from what the server’s default is.

To add to the information provided above, I will also include screenshots of the database properties and permissions of an environment I recently built in case anyone wants to compare their Citrix SQL database with a newly installed instance.

The database name for this example is XenApp:

The Microsoft SQL Server Instance properties are as follows:

Note that the instance has the Server Collation set to SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS.

Properties of the XenDesktop / XenApp Database

Note that the permission assigned to the database uses the delivery controller’s computer account as the user and not a service account like the old XenApp 6.5 IMA architecture.