Multiple Presentation servers Single IP

[mi24k]

How can I set up an IP to point to multiple Citrix servers in case on of my Presentation Servers goes down? Do I use Windows NLB and create a virtual IP and point it to a FQDN in DNS? What do you do if you have to add another Citrix box to PN? Do you really have to touch 50+ clients?

Your help is appreciated!

Mike

 

[enigma99]

mi24k,
You shouldn't need to worry about this at all if you are publishing out an application properly.
When you publish out an application, you can add multiple Citrix Presentation Servers that can host this app so you aren't providing a single point of failure.

For example, if you publish out Word to all of your end-users; during the new publish app wizard it will ask for which servers you want to use for this application. You can use all of your citrix presentation servers or two of the presentation servers.
The end-user will not know the difference because all they would see if the Word icon.

If you lose one of your Citrix servers..it wouldn't be a big issue because Citrix will know that the server is down and route connections to the other Citrix servers.

Having said that..you will need to have either Citrix Advanced licensing to have the "load-balancing" ability.
If you need more information, just go to

http://www.citirx.com

and look for the Citrix Presentation(XenApp) administration guide and it will explain further.

Hope that helps.

 

[mi24k]

I guess I wasn't clear on how we actually use Citrix. We are using PN to connect our end users to the Presentaion server. So in the PN we have to tell it what ip's it needs to try. I am trying to find a way to make it easier to administer and provide a fault tolerance without having to touch end user machines.

Were are using Pres Serv 4.5

 

[enigma99]

mi24k,
Ahhhh...ok.
Why don't you just deploy Web Interface?
You wouldn't have to worry about ever touching any of the deployed devices since you will manage very thing from a web page.

As far as PN and adding additional servers to the "Address List"...I guess you can put in an fqdn in there and have DNS do a round robin to a couple of your ZDC's. Can't tell you how it would work because I have never done it before.
But I guess it's worth a shot and after that...you will have to update your PN clients with the new .ini but you should be able to script that.

Hope that helps.

 

[wrey]

I am not totally familiar with web interface,but what would happen if the server that is running interface goes down? wouldn't that be like having a single point of failure?