Load balance PVS 7.6 and Failover

PVS servers will load balance themselves for vDisk connections. If you are using Microsoft DHCP for Options 66/67, you can only enter the IP address of one server for Option 66.

You can enter up to four PVS servers in the bootstrap file because that is all the data that can fit into a UDP packet.

Making everything else HA/FT/DR ready for PVS is a bit of a struggle and can be a huge PITA.

but what happen if one of the PVS go down with streamed 50 XA servers ?

The 50 servers will automagically connect to other PVS servers and the users will not know anything happened.

how they will be load balanced ?  
how to load balance the DHCP options ?

By setting each vDisk to be load balanced.

http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/provisioning-7/pvs-vdisks-load-balancing.html

If you want Microsoft DHCP to load balance Option 66, you are in for a hard time.

http://blogs.citrix.com/2011/05/02/load-balancing-tftp-anything-but-trivial/

There are many parts to PVS and you need to consider how to make them all load balanced if you are that worried about it. In my opinion, too many people scare themselves to death worrying about it all.

whats your advice ?

what about the Vdsik part ,if the storage go down ? what happen with for the streamed servers

Therein is the rub. How much of your infrastructure do you want to make HA? Every part of everything that PVS touches will have to be made HA.

Are your switches, routers, firewalls, SQL servers, storage, NICs, datacenter, electrical, HVAC etc etc etc all HA? Why worry about one thing without worrying about everything?

If you are worried about storage, then storage must be made HA and that can get very expensive.

well ,if we are talking about HA for PVS parts only ? the most critical parts

that would be the servers and the vdisks.

have multiple pvs servers.

I prefer local to the pvs server storage for the vdisks. I then use robocopy to copy the vdisks from the "master" pvs server to the other servers.

can you please give more idea about the local option and robocopy ?

Just a basic batch file that copies the vhd and pvp files from the master server to all the other pvs servers. never copy the lok files.

Something similar to:

copy *.vhd \\pvs2\share\folder /y
copy *.pvp \\pvs2\share\folder /y

There are lots of sites that show you how to do this:

http://adminhelper.blogspot.com/2013/07/copying-vdisk-versions-from-one-pvs-to.html
http://vhorizon.co.uk/robocopy-script-to-replicate-citrix-pvs-vdisk-store/
http://www.carlstalhood.com/provisioning-services-server-install/#robocopy

do you mean to run this as a script in case of DR?

why you prefer to store the Vdisk locally not in SAN?

No the script is run after you update a vdisk, change it to production and need to copy the updated vdisk to the other pvs servers.

I prefer local to stay away from the storage team, reduced network traffic and reduced i/o.

what about the streamed VMs storage ?

I use local to the pvs server storage for the vdisks as mentioned above.  vDisks = streamed VM storage

thanks for your help