Citrix Failover

[w33mhz]

Does anyone have any links or ideas on setting up a failover site for a citrix farm? Currently all of my servers in my farm in a central location, we are going to setup a DR site and I was wanting suggestions on this. Should I setup a new farm and failover to it (so to speak) or just use the existing farm and just have some of the servers in the DR site. Or any better ideas

 

[aco636]

If you have he money I would take a look at VMWare. They can do some very clever things for failover without the hassel of migrating data, etc.
Hope this helps
Regards ACO

 

[w33mhz]

yes VMWare does have site failover software but just for VMWare. I have experimented with VMWare for my citrix servers and the VM's just couldn't hold the number of users that we needed for this. I am currently running VMWare for app servers and it works well for that, just not for Terminal Services\Citrix.

I am probably opening up a can of worms on that statement but for my current senario it won't work.

 

[scanjam]

you could use the citrix policy for Zone preference and failover. All users get the primary site information and are "load balanced" so to speak to the primary site first, and if down, connect to the DR site.

Other things that would need to be redundant (thought citrix should continue to work without for at least 30 days) is the citrix database server, the licence server, whatever you use for printing and secure gateway / Access gateway redundancy also.

Doesnt help with server "settings" or setup, so there would have to be a number of 'stand by' servers ready to go at the DR sites.

hope this might help

 

[w33mhz]

Thanks, I will look into that, that is something I was looking for. I should look into moving my citrix database to a SQL Express db on a VM, that should cover me on that.