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Designing a small Citrix farm w/ redundancy?
We are designing a Citrix Terminal Server farm for an organization of about 100 - 130 concurrent users. We are using XenApp6 w/ Server 2008 R2
We would like to have some redundancy built into it. Ideally we are going to have 3 application servers, we would then like to have a server that runs the roles of secure gateway, xml, web services, xenapp services and license server.
Don't worry about the hardware etc..., i am just concerned with server's with OS's at the moment.
Is there an easy way to set up a server that can assume those roles in the event of it fails? Thanks in advance.
We would like to have some redundancy built into it. Ideally we are going to have 3 application servers, we would then like to have a server that runs the roles of secure gateway, xml, web services, xenapp services and license server.
Don't worry about the hardware etc..., i am just concerned with server's with OS's at the moment.
Is there an easy way to set up a server that can assume those roles in the event of it fails? Thanks in advance.
ASKER
What about the Datastore? Isn't that required for the Citrix Farm to operate.
The data store should be on a SQL server if you are worried about uptime and or redundancy.
ASKER
Citrix recommends not to install SQL on a XenApp box so that would mean the minimum amount of servers I could have for complete redundancy would be 4( 2 exclusively SQL that are replicating the datastore, 2 citrix xenapp servers), does that sound right?
Yes, that sounds right but can you afford 2 SQL Server licenses? How are you planning on making the data store highly available? Are you planning on putting the license server, CSG and WI on both xenapp servers?
Is there any server virtualization involved or are all the servers physical?
ASKER
The Datastore high availability would be achieved using SQL site replication. We are still looking at this from a high level and haven't yet decided on how many physical vs. virtual servers we will be using. We are in the design phase right now and I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas on how else to replicate the datastore for high availability or manual failover. Was hoping to not have to deploy two servers that are only running SQL. Thanks for your help.
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ASKER
Good to know, I wasn't aware that the xenapp servers could still serve requests if they aren't able to access the data store. Any drawback to having License server, WI and CSG already installed on a designated backup server prior to one failing?
Microsoft licensing does not allow you to do that unless you have the appropriate license levels and agreements. Citrix does not mind. Just make sure you are not in violation of Microsoft licensing.
I do not see a problem with having a backup server ready to go. I all my years of doing this, I have NEVER seena NEED to do so. A WANT, yes, a NEED, no. If you are that worried about a server failing, you need better hardware. Just my $0.02US worth.
I do not see a problem with having a backup server ready to go. I all my years of doing this, I have NEVER seena NEED to do so. A WANT, yes, a NEED, no. If you are that worried about a server failing, you need better hardware. Just my $0.02US worth.
If you have three XenApp 6 servers, they will automatically provide redundancy if all the apps are installed and published on all three servers.
You can lose a license server and have 30 days to get it back up and running so I really would worry about that role.
CSG and WI can be run on the same server. I would NOT run them on any of the XenApp Servers. I have heard of people being able to use WIndows NLB with their CSG/WI servers but it is not a supported configuration by Citrix.