New Load balancing setup 1

[fs483]

Hello,

A client wanted to upgrade from Citrix XPs to a full load balanced Citrix Setup. We are going step by step. On their old Citrix XPs, they had both published desktop and published apps. Both external users and internal users connect to Citrix for their accounting software. We have purchased 2 HP DL360G5 with 73GB HD (in Raid 1) and 5GB Ram each. We should be ok on the hardware side. We installed Citrix PS4 enterprise on Windows 2003 Enterprise on both servers. The accounting software is also installed on each server. Now we want to make sure load balancing works properly. I have opened the required ports on my firewall to point to the first Citrix server and it works fine. Do I need to open ports for the second server ? I would say no since the first Citrix server should be doing the load balancing. We want to also move all users to published desktop. Now I'm confused how to make sure documents that are saved on the desktop of the first Citrix Server would appear on the second. I suppose I can use roaming profiles but can I store those roaming profiles on a third server that is attached through LAN ? How about a fixed profile on the 3rd server (also accessible through LAN), but I would have to redirect the document and settings folders. Which one is better ? The old Citrix server is still in production. The new Citrix Servers with load balancing need to be operational in very very short time. What would I need to do to complete this setup ? I will start locking down the desktop and start installing all the printers.

regards,
akwong

 

[enigma99]

akwong,
You will need to open up the 1494 port going to all of your Citrix servers (so I would just make 1494 available to your external network on your firewall).
The reason why is because your Citrix client (workstation/fatclient/thinclient) will query your first server (datacollector)for its published app list. Once the publish app list is presented to the client...the end-user could possibly connect to either one of those two servers (depending on the load of those servers). At that point you will be communicating directly to either one of those servers...you will NOT be using the 1st server as a gateway.

The second question is about publishing the entire desktop. Publishing a full desktop is a little bit more complex than publishing a single app.
I would suggest implementing a roaming profile and controlling your desktop via GPO.
The GPO will allow you to redirect the "My Documents" folder to a network share where it can be backed up and always available via multiple servers.
You will need to think about making this environment redundent for both your roaming profiles share and your "home" share. Imagine if a user does not get their regular roaming profile and can't get to their home documents.....ahhhhh!!!
You might want to go with MS Clustering for both your profile and home share so you can provide the most uptime.

Hope that helps.

 

[fs483]

enigma99,

Ok, well I've been locking down the desktop today and maybe think of doing a mandatory profile. Still reading on that. Now for MS clustering. We had purchased Windows 2003 Enterprise just for that and then later on thought that MS Clustering would interfere as with Citrix Load balancing. Am I correct ? Ideally I would love to have both servers fully redundant WITHOUT a third server for now. We will have a second SAN in the future for a backend to the full SQL Clustering servers. The first SAN is used in another dept but we can "borrow" some space for now. How would you do it if you went the MS Clustering route ?

regards,
akwong

 

[enigma99]

akwong,
MS Clustering and Citrix load-balancing are two totally seperate components and they don't interact.
Citrix will only load-balance an application, content or desktop only if the Citrix application is installed (A or E) and if you configure that published application, content or Citrix desktop for load-balancing.
MS Clustering will simply be two (or more) Win2k3 Enterprise servers with a SAN, private network (for clustering purposes) and they will house the shares for your home/profile directory. They do not have the Citrix application on them so you don't have to worry about that.

As far as configuration on MS Clustering...it depends how many users you have in your environment.
In smaller environments I like to have just a "Profile" and "Home" share. All of the roaming/mandatory profiles will go in the Profiles share and all of their home directories will go in the "Home" share.

If you have a large enterprise environment with a large number of users...you might want to split up the profiles share. Have like a Profiles1, Profiles2, Profiles3 so you don't have any performance issues when browsing to those shares. I used to have a customer that had performance issues browsing to their home or profile shares because they had 100's of thousands of folders in those shares.
We ended up splitting them up into 3 different shares (A-I) went into Profiles1, (J-R) went into Profiles2 and then (S-Z) went into Profiles3 (same with the home directory).

I hear that Win2k3 R2 has a new feature that only displays folders that the end-user has access to. This is good because they will not see the other 100's of folders in the profiles or home shares. You might want to look at that and see if you want to go with that (i believe it is also available as a hotfix).

I should suggest having 3 node cluster (if it is a large environment) Active/Active/Passive. Have Profiles and Home dir's spread across both Active nodes. Passive will only be in case of failure or if you are having performance issues with a server you can fail it over to that passive node to spread the load out more.
If smaller...I would simply go with a Active/Active config. Make sure you size your hardware properly so if one node fails the single node will be able to take on the extra load when the other resources fail over to it.

Long post but I hope that helps.

 

[Dublin73]

Hi enigma99, what you're referring here...

"I hear that Win2k3 R2 has a new feature that only displays folders that the end-user has access to."

is "Windows Access Based enumeration" and it works brilliantly! It's a small snap in, here's the link...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...D9-78D9-4342-A485-B030AC442084&displaylang=en

I've set this up in an environment where all of the users are redirected to the same desktop and the same start menu folder ( via a Windows GPO ). Within these 2 folders you've got all your application shortcuts. Here's where it gets nice! you permission each shortcut with a Windows Global Group. For example call one global group MSWord or something. You'd then grant this MSWord global group access to the Microsoft Word icons in your 2 desktop and start menu folders. From there, if you want a user to have access to Microsoft Word, drop him in the MSWord global group. If the user isn't a member of the MSWord group, as you've pointed out, it's not a case of the user seeing the icon in their start menu, clicking on it and then getting an access denied error message. They simply don't see the icon at all... and as a result don't have access.

Regarding your profiles akwong, check out Flex-Profiles...

http://www.brianmadden.com/content/content.asp?ID=551

They're the business. Minimum profile storage and you can pre-define or hand pick what parts of a user's profile are saved at logout. This can be done for anything in the profile, Word settings, internet history, any user specific profile folders or registry keys etc.

with flex profiles, everyone shares the same one Mandatory profile ( about 600K in size or so ). Then the indiviual user profile settings get saved in a single file at logout... possibly to the users home directory. This same file then gets loaded up again at logon

Within this mandatory profile that everyone's sharing, you can redirect the location of "My Documents" and "Internet Favorites" etc. to a place of your choice. Possibly the users' home directories.

Oh yeah, Flex Profiles is free as well. I can't sing its praises enough!

good luck anyway. let us know how you get on