NFuse Failover

[cnorris517]

Guys
I need to find a way to configure an ica address in such a way that the client recieves two different destination ip's for one netbios or dns name. Basically I need to configure Citrix's web interface at a spoke site with a failover (not load balanced)of functionality at a central site. The failover must be seamless (or near enough) and the client devices (mainly ce and some old 9x pc's using the ica client) must not have to be reconfigured in the event of a fail-over. I've thought about using cluster services but the servers are geographically distant and the bandwidth isn't available to support heartbeats and shared storage etc etc. The only thing I've come up with is possibly using DNS or WINS multi-homing but I can't figure out how to make sure that the only time the hub site does any work is when the spoke has failed. HELP!!
thanks in advance
CN

 

[jaymz]

You probably won't find an easy solution to your issue. DNS won't failover as it's not meant to. I do feel your pain though. The WI is such a critical thing to keep running 100% of the time. Currently i just keep two web servers ready and up to date via rsync (win32 port). If one fails, someone has to manually switch DNS entries. It is far some seamless.

IIS 6.0 has native functionality that supports some type of failover, though it's far from out of the box. You can that information here:

http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/support/failover.asp

Otherwise, it looks like 3rd party apps are the only way to go as far as I know.

-Jaymz

 

[Petje]

Why not use NLB service of Windows 2000.
Both servers receive the same virtual ip (the ip / name the clients connect to)

So when 1 server fails auto connection is to the other available server.

Simple form of "clustering"...



Petje
A+, MCP, MCSE on NT4.0 and windows 2000 and Windows server 2003 and CCEA

 

[cnorris517]

Hi Petje/Jaymz thanks for your responses. Unfortunately neither of them is really ideal for my situation. NLB would be a good fit for most networks unfortunately this particular one is run across 64k mpls, I need to properly control (and limit) unnecessary traffic that goes across those lines so that valid ica and ima traffic can cross without problems. I only really want traffic crossing the wan when the server on site fails. So far I've come up with this solution let me know what you think.....


I've created a static wins entry which points to the iis/nfuse on site2 in the event that either iis or nfuse fails on the server and can't be brought back quickly the wins entry can be modified with the ip address of the iis/nfuse server at site1. In that way the clients don't have to be reconfigured and (in testing anway) we can fail over inside 1 minute although in practice I expect it to take 3 or 4 minutes at least.

I look forward to your comments
Thanks
Chris