XP Data Store questions

[KAlfred]

We currently have 2 Citrix farms. One with Metaframe XPa and one with Metaframe 1.8. We will be migrating the 1.8 farm to XP over time. We recently had one of our XP servers go down and as a result users were not able to login to the second server in the XP farm. I'm still learning when it comes to XP. Am I right in my assumption that this is because the server that went down holds the data store for the XP farm? If so, what steps should we take to prevent this from happening so that if a server goes down users will be able to immediately log back in onto a different server? Thanks, for your time.

 

[adr18nl3g0n]

I have 4 servers in my XP farm and I use an external datasource - SQL. This is a much safer bet, so if a server does go down, we can carry on as we are with users logging on to another server, the data source is not affected.

Using access or even SQL on a Metaframe server is a bad idea, because you are then totally dependent on that server and is slower. In my experience with Citrix you need to plan well and consider redundancy, becuase your whole company may be using it, and if the design is wrong your company is in big trouble. All my servers are exactly the same, redundant hardware (power and fan), Raid 5, dual Nics etc.. and an external server housing SQL.

 

[KAlfred]

Thanks, again. You've confirmed my suspicions about the separate server for the data store. What steps would you go through to move the data store from one server to another? What minimum hardware requirements would there be for a seperate data store server?