Load Balancing Problem

[Ian18]

I have a citrix farm of 4 servers. A server user load is applied to each server with 35 maximum connections. On various occassions I have noticed that one server can take over the specified amount, while the other servers have only a few connections. Terminals connect upto the
citrix farm via a dns entry acting on round robin (which I know works). Can anyone help?

 

[tk36]

Sorry if I ask stupid questions..
Are all servers providing different published applications?
Can users run desktop sessions?
If the answer to the 2 questions above is 'yes' that might be the reason. Users might be running the application available on a particular server at the same time, and/or select to connect to that particular server for their desktop sessions at the same time.
Just the thought.

 

[Ian18]

Just to expand. User use Wyse terminals to connect to the citrix farm. They don't have a choice of a paticular server. The only thing that the servers are running is a restricted desktop. I think the problem occurs when it comes to the ima/lhc checking to see which server is the least used.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Another stupid question;

If you're running Citrix Load-Balancing, why are you using DNS Round Robin?

Simply publish the desktop as an app, and users will still not have a choice as to which server to log into - and you might find that Citrix LB works properly.

Hope this is helpful CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[Ian18]

Round Robin DNS is onlyon because we were trying to find a solution to this problem. I will switch it off and monitor over the next couple of days. Thanks

 

[Ian18]

Have adjusted DNS to only point to one citrix server and let citrix do the load balancing. Problem is still happening. Any suggestions

 

[CitrixEngineer]

1. Are you using one of the built-in rules, or custom rules?

2. What is the load level reported by each server if you drop to a command prompt and type query farm /load?

3. Quote "Have adjusted DNS to only point to one citrix server and let citrix do the load balancing" /Quote.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this - you have DNS pointing to only one Citrix server?

Hope some of this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[ykbhardwaj]

I am also facing the same problem. Only one application published from 8 servers. Tried application user load, server user load togather, separately but still one of the servers takes more than two times the full load value. Tried application load balancing but no result. Now i have configured different customized load evaluator for each server and awaiting result.

 

[Ian18]

I am using a custom rule that says if the server load is more than 35 reject requests.

The DNS issue is that we use an entry in the dns call ica. Originally it was pointing to 4 server addresses and using dns round robin. Now it only points to one of the server addresses.

If you do a qfarm /load the load reports OK. The server reports that it has load balancing and depending on the load of the server reports the numbers that it should.

cheers

 

[Ian18]

The load balancing seems to be working now. I have altered DNS to point to only one server address, deleted and recreated the local host cache on the servers, deleted the custom load eval and recreated. It now seems to be working.