by Jake Walsh, CTA
CUGC User Share Webinar Follow Up Blog Post: Improving the Resiliency of your XenDesktop environment–StoreFront Multi Site and NetScaler GSLB
First of all, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who tuned in to the webinar – it was great to see so many people tuned in and the questions were awesome too! In this post I will answer the key questions I couldn’t answer during the webinar. Also, a huge thank you to Dave Brett (@dbretty) for moderating the webinar!
As always – if you have anything else you’d like to know more about, please reach out to me on Twitter @jakewalsh90 – I’d love to hear your comments and feedback. I’ve also tweeted out a survey to decide on the topic for my next webinar.
Click here for the Presentation Slides. And here for a recording of the session.
Question 1: Can a XenDesktop site be stretched if there is a good connection between DataCenters?
Of course – there’s no issue with this at all and it’s quite a common scenario. StoreFront multi-site however, really only comes into its own when you have at least 2 farms. There’s no issue with stretching a Site though and this is common practise I find.
Question 2: Where is the setting for changing Delivery Controller timeout on StoreFront?
This is under the Advanced Settings section within the Store Settings. In StoreFront, click on your Store and then on “Configure Store Settings”. You’ll then see the following under Advanced Settings:
The Communication timeout duration is the value used to determine how long StoreFront will wait for a response from a DDC.
Question 3: Do you have to re-authenticate to StoreFront after a Controller Failure?
Nope – this should just work without any issue. The brokering is done at the time of application launch, whereas the authentication is done before any applications are displayed via the login screen.
Question 4: How is DNS Delegation handled in a failure scenario?
The main change in a Site Failure scenario is that of the two Name Server records in our Delegated DNS Zone, only the 2nd record (the ADNS IP of our Site B NetScalers) is going to respond. I have tested this with only Site B elements functional (All Site A NetScalers offline) and DNS requests are handled with no issue.
This is in part due to the fact that the lookup is handled by the Windows DNS Server – so a client machine requests the A record for StoreFront-GSLB.jake.lab and this is forwarded by the Windows DNS server to the NetScaler ADNS IPs. See https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX121713 for further details on this.
Question 5: How can we configure resource aggregation for an active/active DataCenter scenario?
This is configured in a very similar manner to the Active/Passive setup that I demonstrated – but instead of ticking the box within StoreFront for “Controllers publish identical resources” we tick “Load Balance resources across Controllers”. This will spread users out across the Active/Active DC Setup.
