Hi mpopal,
I use Citrix XenApp 4.5 but in a much smaller environment. 1 server farm with 2 servers running W2K3 standard.
Application streaming is one of the strengths of XenApp 4.5 but it also depends on the applications you have and how they are accessed. Streaming may not be the best option depending on how your applications run. EG. if your apps will need to access resources on your LAN stream to client may not be the best option. You can even have apps streamed to clients that are available when disconnected from your servers. You would also need to consider your bandwidth since the apps will be accessed over the internet.
You can have applications streamed to the client so that the application files are copied to the client computer. You can have them streamed to server where only a small subset are copied to the client and the rest are installed on the servers. You can also as usual just present a desktop to the users and have the application run totally on the servers.
You can choose to have the applications installed on the servers though I prefer to use profiled apps myself. I find the profiles easier to deal with and you can play around more with them, avoid application clashes, use application isolation, etc. With stream to server you can choose to have the applications stream to all servers in the farm or dedicate certain servers to certain apps.
Another thing which I think I should mention because I got it wrong at first - when an app is set to stream to multiple servers, users apps are streamed to run on individual servers in a round-robin fashion dynamically - not that each user's app will be distributed across chosen servers. So with 1000 users logged on to an app streamed to 5 servers, each server will handle 200 users.
I would suggest dedicating 1 server to licensing, at least 1 as a configuration server with another doubling as a backup configuration server, and the rest as presentation servers.
Unfortunately, I haven't worked with Edgesite, Provisioning server or the other goodies.
In the end, to have your farm(s) running smoothly and to be able to troubleshoot and develop in the future, I recommend a real study of the many docs that Citrix offers with the software. I think it is essential to understand the system as much as possible *before* you start. I tried setting up without reading and though I got it to run, I couldn't understand certain behaviours (and this is only 2 servers) - a nightmare to say the least. No fun reading when the phones are ringing ;)
Hope this helps. All the best
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by: BLipmanPosted on 2009-08-27 at 08:36:25ID: 25199432
One issue you will face is using all of that RAM per server. You can go x64 on the OS to make use of 4+ GB but then you have to make sure your applications and print drivers are ok with 64 bit. Your other good option would be virtualization; you can make most of those blades VMs with 4GB RAM and dual processors. I would then use core affinity and fixed memory reservations to guarantee performance but you could easily pack 4 VM servers per host. I would have redundant Web Interface servers, redundant STA servers (one of which can be your data collector). I would use SQL Workgroup Edition at a minimum just so you can schedule DB maintenance but SQL Express is fine if you are comfortable doing backups and optimizations by hand.
I don't know anything about your application though so truely accurate recommendations would take into account how dense you can pack users onto a terminal server and how best to tune them. Not knowing this I can generalize but you really have some testing to do! If you took 8 VM servers running ESXi (for example), make 4 Citrix guests per VM, that gives you 32 servers for applications. If your 1000 users are concurrent you are still under 35 users per server which should be comfortable for most applications on a well configured system. Obviously 35 instances of a CAD program vs 35 notepad uses make a night and day difference for server architecture.