Farm & failover server question from newbie 1

[lb63640]

You will see immediately by my questions that I am very new to the Citrix world, so please forgive the extremely basic nature of my questions.

I have one server running Citrix MetaFrame XP on a Windows 2000 server. It's been up and running for about 6 weeks, and is making half a dozen users in remote offices happy. We are ready now to add about a dozen more users, have the appropriate amount of licenses installed, yadda, yadda.

We need to create a backup or failover solution so that if if Server One decides to die, a second server is ready to jump into action and carry on so the users don't suffer downtime. Or if there is downtime, it's extremely minimal.

We have Server Two (formerly a Terminal Services box) that I have installed the identical MetaFrame scenario on, and am installing identical applications, also.

What is the best scenario for this? If Server One dies, power up Server Two so remote users can still access a server? I know there has to be a better, more automatic way to handle this situation, and would appreciate any advice.

I'm still investigating the "farm" solution, but don't completely understand the idea behind it. How do I create a "farm" and make Server One and Server Two belong to it?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Replies may be sent to (please note this is a reverse order to thwart address harvesters) yahoo.com@lb63640

 

[Ogi]

Hi,

You'll already have a farm for your server, open CMC and it's there!

What version of XP are you running?

If you have XPa or XPe then you can user Load Balancing, that way you publish one application, link it to both servers, load manage it with default evaluator not advanced. Then should one server die, the users would then just start a new session to server two.

Please note though, Citrix do not support in any shape fault tollerance. Therefore if a server dies, the user sessions die! Work is lost "yadda, yadda" as you say ;-)

You may want to consider identical hardware as well, this ensures pretty much the same performance from each server.

Feel free to ask away!
Cheers,
Carl.

 

[lb63640]

We really aren't publishing the apps, if I understand the term correctly. When the remote user connects to the server with the client, they get the entire desktop. How will this impact my farm idea?

 

[mwiner]

Well that does impact the farm idea quite a bit. From what I have seen I do not think there is a way to point to one citrix server from an ICA client for a full desktop and have it bounce over to another server if the first one fails.

HOWEVER! There are two ideas to do this. Both involve publishing applications. You can Publish applications and publish FULL DESKTOPS to the user's program neighborhood. OR 2. The solution that we came up with for that idea was to install Citix Web Interface. We publish applications and desktops as needed and the user logs into Citrix via the web interface. (still requires the client on the desktop) but a very slick interface.

Now (if you are using XPa or XPe) when you publish these desktops/apps just set the application to be able to be served from both of your servers. This allows for load balancing across them. You can then tell citrix to limit connections based on server status, load, etc. If a server goes down, the next user will get put onto the up server. Once the server comes back any new connections will begin to be balanced.

 

[lb63640]

Thanks already for your kind responses. I am learning so much in this forum!

From within our LAN, I can hit Server One or Server Two successfully using either the Citrix ICA Client or a Terminal Services Client.

From home, I can hit Server One and Server Two successfully only with a Terminal Services Client. Regardless of the connection settings I make, I can only connect via ICA Client to Server One.

Am I having this connectivity experience because I have two separate servers, but only one static IP address? If Server One was down (offline for maintenance, shut off due to a power failure, or just gone from the planet, etc), would I then be able to make the WAN connection to Server Two? Or would I get an error message about server being unavailable?

 

[mwiner]

So help me understand.
At your firewall where are are sending port 3389 and port 1494?

One static IP. Where, Internal or external?

What version of XP are you running?

 

[lb63640]

Many thanks for your kind patience!

Here are the responses:

At the firewall, Server One listens at port 1494. Server Two listens at port 3389 (which was the default setting from when it was a Terminal Server only). Have I gone astray here--and should I assign a different port for the MetaFrame connection on that server?

One external static IP, separate internal IP addresses.

MetaFrame XPe FR 3.

 

[mwiner]

XPe - good. You will need this for load balancing.

Here is the problem with your current config:
As you stated above you would like a way for failover and load balance to be automatic. Well without the use of a network load balancer at your firewall you will not accompish this. As you said you have the RDP port (1494) pointing to server one and the ICA port (3389) pointing to server two. Hence the reason you can only get to one machine with only one protocol.

Like you said you can start changing port numbers for ICA and RDP on each server. It is possible check out
How to Change the ICA Port Number Assignment in MetaFrame

But I would recommend this be done another way. By changing port numbers there is nothing automagic about your two servers. Your users will have to try to connect to server one, fail, then try server two. Why not let citrix handle this.

First off get your servers in the same farm (our other discussion).

Next you need to decided how the users can use one point of entry to access your citrix farm (server one and server two). Do you have a VPN?

If you do then that may be the best way. With a VPN your users can login to your network connect to maybe a Citrix Web Interface Server (real easy to install!). Through that have a Desktop published that is being served from both server one and server two.

I have not setup the web interface to work though a firewall directly. But I am pretty sure that in the Web Interface configuration this is pretty easy to setup. You should be able to just configure the Web Interface for Port Address Translation. Setup the firewall to see the web server on the inside. Connect to your web server which should serve the applications from your Citrix. Like I said I am a bit fuzzy on how this part works. I wish I could help you more there.

But without a single point of entry (i.e. Web interface, program neighborhood) there is no way to be able load balance the access to the servers. You cannot initiate a direct RDP or ICA connection to one server and have it balance between the two.

Hope this is helping.

-Matt