XenApp 6.0 Policies force Users to log Into Local XenApp Server

Let's say you have 3 sites in a farm. You need to organize each site's servers in a separate worker group. So site 1 will have worker group 1, site 2 will have worker group 2 and so on.

Then when you publish word (or any application) you publish it to all three worker groups.

Then in the Delivery Services Console on the Load Balancing Policies node you will create a load balancing policy as follows:

1. You will filter it to apply to the users in one site - say site 1.

2. You will add all three worker groups; however worker group of site 1 should have priority 1

This way users in site 1, when starting word or any app, will be directed to least loaded server from worker group 1. Only when none of the servers in worker group 1 are available the user will be directed to other worker groups depending on the priority set; hence achieving high availability.

You will create two more policies (1 for each site) and filter each to the site's users. Site 2 should have worker group 2 as priority 1 and in the third policy site 3 should have worker group 3 as priority 1.

Thanks for the reply. Since I have never used Citrix load balancing before I have the following questions.

1) I already have my Citrix server is both sites in their own zones and worker groups.

2) All of my remote users are not in a group but in a seperate OU.  If I filter by users would users from another site be able to access resources if need be or will they be denied access?

3) if I do setup the load balance policy as listed when users open the web interface will they see all application hosted in the farm or just the applications hosted on their local xenapp server. I know if users see all apps my users are going to get confused as to which apps to click on.

4) My manager has asked me what would purchasing one Netscaler for our remote site do for use over citrix's policies> In other words would can the netscaler provide for us that we cannot do via policies

1) If you have each site configured as a separate zone then the data collector of the user's zone will respond with the least loaded server in that zone provided that you give each site's users a separate web interface configured with its own site's XML. However, you configure the policies to ensure failover, otherwise when no servers in the same zone are capable of handling requests the user in that zone will not be able to proceed.

2) You can filter by IP address instead - but I do urge you to organize your users into groups as this would ease administration and is the best practices. Yes, a user from another site will still be able to access resources if published to them (unless explicitly denied access) - however, with no zone configuration or policy filtering you will not be able to ensure that they land on a server in their own site.

3) They will see all the applications published to them regardless if the application is on their local XenApps. If you only want them to see applications installed on their local XenApps then only publish those to them.

4) Netscaler will provide intelligent local as well as global load balancing and segragation between sites. The benefit of a Netscaler is more than load balancing citrix products but also balancing other non-Citrix servers - but usually used to load balance the web interface servers. Policies are a cheap way for managing load balancing but it is no match in intelligency and with more policies created more administrative overhead is introduced - moreover it is used to load balance XenApps not web interface. I am no NetScaler specialist - but it not usually used to load balance the XenApps.

Mutawadi covered this in excellent detail.. I will add one thing.

You can configure WI to hide applications from users using javascript.  It's not too difficult to locate the scripts to do this, and based on that code, you can get more detailed in *how* you hide it, if you have a good web programmer.  

the basic listed code lets you hide applications by putting a # mark as the first character of the description, and it works very well.

Coralon

Thanks for the feed back everyone. My main reason for setting up one farm with one DS, 2 DC and two web servers ws do to the following.

1) All users in each site to access application hosted on their local XenAPP server

2) D/R I want to be able to access application in other site if one site should fail.

3) Here is one problem I have, I know you can publish apps to groups of users in order to hide them from the WI but this would help me in a D/R situation. I would need to manually added the other site user group to the apps to order for the users in the order site to see and use the applications. Right now users see every application in both site which is going to confuse my users. Even though applicatinos are labled Word -Site 1 or Word - SIte w they still do not know which icons to click on. I'm hoping there was a way for me to have all apps access but hidden but only viewable it there local xenapp server is down.

Where can I find easy to read information on the full features for NetScaler VPX

How would I create a folder viewed in my WI that would contain my DR apps as you mentioned?

When you publish the apps, change the Folder in the Shortcut Presentation section of the properties. Whatever you put in that text box appears as a folder.  If you use a \, it will treat it as nested folders.

Coralon