Citrix XenApp Farms Vs. Zones

In Citrix XenApp a Farm is a grouping of servers. But more importantly, a Farm is a group of XenApp Servers that share a common data store. A Zone is a logical grouping of servers used to control IMA traffic. Data Collectors are selected in a preferred order to send IMA traffic between Zones. You can think of Zones as Active Directory sites and Data Collectors as Bridgehead servers. As soon as I first learned of the concept of a Zone a question instantly popped into my head… What about the data store? The data store is a SQL Server database that all the XenApp servers in a farm contact when they start-up, and while they are running. Mostly they perform read operations against the data store, but may in some cases perform writes (when configuration changes are made). How can you control this traffic across a WAN? A zone does not allow for control for this traffic. The answer is to place a read-only copy of the SQL Server database in each of the sites where the XenApp Servers exist and then use SQL Server replication to replicate the data over the WAN. This allows for reads to be performed locally and writes to be performed over the WAN. Which therefore reduces demand on the WAN.
This is no longer the case, instead it is best to use Session-only XenApp servers, see: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX131943
Even more info here: http://blogs.citrix.com/2011/09/19/speeding-up-farm-deployments-with-xenapp-6-5/



Popular posts from this blog

Get local computer UUID/GUID using Windows Powershell

Use the following syntax to get the local computer's UUID/GUID using Windows Powershell: get-wmiobject Win32_ComputerSystemProduct  | Select-Object -ExpandProperty UUID Add -computername after the WMI class to find a remote computer's UUID, example: get-wmiobject Win32_ComputerSystemProduct -computername RANTPC | Select-Object -ExpandProperty UUID
Read more

gPLink and gPOptions

gPLink is a property for sites, domains and organisational units that contains a prioritised list of GPOs linked to the node. gPOptions is a property that contains all Block Policy Inheritance settings for the node. To manage GPO links on a node, you must have read and write access to the gPLink and gPOptions properties.
Read more

PSLoggedOn Getting Started on Windows Server 2008 R2

Image
PSLoggedOn is a tool I downloaded to allow me to find out which computers a user is currently logged on to. Getting it up and running wasn’t exactly easy. I’m running a Windows Server 2008 R2 test environment. The first error I encountered was: Error browing network: The list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available. Note: I kept the spelling mistake from the error message to make it easier to find via search engines. To get past this error, you have to enable and start the “Computer Browser” service. Then I started getting the error telling me that the Administrator is not logged on. That’s simply not true because I am logged onto another server (Name: ELARA): I turned the firewall OFF OFF OFF (It is a test network after all). I enabled Network Discovery and to do that I went on a service starting frenzy: DNS Client, Function Discovery Resource Publication, SSDP Discovery, and UPnP Device Host, Computer Browser After all that, I ran the script against the se
Read more