Load balancing a large application.

[Thosas]

Hello, please can somebody help me out by giving their expert opinion on the below problem?

I have a very large application (or at least potentially large, its a development environment so the actual memory and cpu usage can vary greatly), this application in some cases MUST run on Citrix even though neither Citrix or the product is really intended for use over a thin client.
In the cases where the software is going to require large amounts of RAM per user (256mb -> 1GB) I obviously need to load balance its use across servers in a farm, say by only allowing 2-3 instances per box before the farm redirects requests to another server.

The problem is that if there are other applications running on the Citrix box too, such as msoffice then I still want to allow some of these connections in so the server cant be marked as a full load.

Is this possible?

Thanks
Justin

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Personally I would isolate this app onto its own server(s) so that MS Office users are not impacted, and the app can use as much resource as it likes. If you're going to publish it anyway, then I think this would be a good solution.

Of course, this is the real world, and that might not be an option to you - so you can simply limit the number of times this application can be run on each server in the Published Application Wizard - or the Properties context menu. This will not affect your Load Management rules.

HTH