At a start-up of a project often the requirements and wishes of the organization are sky-high. Everything should be possible and included. Sometimes it just looks like they are ordering a dish at restaurant and ask to add all ingredients that are possible (Everything on Top). Logically when the project is actually starting and/or evolving those requirements and wishes are reflected to the available budget and the current infrastructure/environment, so the goals and targets are adjusted. However sometime everything should actually on top and I participated in such a project. In this article series I will describe the experiences during this project. Instead of using the standard approach I will discuss the biggest discussion points during the project and how those discussions ended. But first I will start with a short description of the current infrastructures and the requirements of the project.

Introducing Relay Server

To start the article it’s good to explain what the RES Relay Server actually is. The RES Relay Server is introduced in RES Workspace Manager 2012. Before the Relay Server all Workspace Manager clients (called Agents) are directly connecting to the SQL database where the configuration and logging of RES Workspace Management is stored. In case of real large environments this could be resource intensive on the SQL database. Also in the case of several offices/more sites the traffic between the agent and the database will be transferred over (slower) WAN links. In the last scenario RES Workspace Manager (RES WM) could be used with a second mirrored database, but this involves more hardware and software costs. The relay server component can be used for such scenarios. The relay server is separate component, which can be installed on a Windows machine. The agent server will communicate with the database and caches all the information. The agent will be connected to the relay server and retrieve the settings from the relay server.

Introduction

In the first part I showed and described the installation of XenDesktop, Citrix Provisioning Services and the corresponding agents. We will continue where we ended the first article, starting the image wizard of the Citrix Provisioning Services agent.

Creating the vDisk

If you did have worked with Citrix Provisioning Services for some time the creation vDisk process is pretty changed. The wizard starts my specifing the CPS server to connect to the CPS Farm. The second step is to create the vDisk within the farm by specifying the vDisk name, on which Store the vDisk should be stored, the VDH Type and the VDH Block Size. In the case you already have vDisks available; you can also select an existing vDisk.

In March 2012 Citrix released XenDesktop 5.6. In this XenDesktop release the RingCube acquisition was integrated into the product as a feature called Personal vDisk. One of my customers was interested in this XenDesktop 5.6 with the Personal vDisk as an alternative for those who could not fit in the XenApp environment. I build a Proof of Concept with XenDesktop 5.6 combined with Citrix Provisioning Services 6.1. In this article I will describe the installation steps, the configuration and my real life experiences with the products and the setup.

Introduction

Microsoft put many efforts to improve the Remote Desktop Services (formerly known as Terminal Services) features in the latest releases. With Windows 2008R2 many improvements are made and the product is getting closer to the third party add-on product like Citrix XenApp. RemoteApps, plug-n-play devices, audio/video playback and recording are some examples of supported features. In the earlier days the lack of load balancing the users between more RD servers was one the big disadvantages. Nowadays the load balancing feature in Windows 2008R2 is comparable with most (smaller) 3party add-ons, however the Citrix Load Balancing is still much more flexible and offers most more configuration settings. The current Microsoft implementation (RD Broker) is by default a single point of failure and within Microsoft technologies this can only be adjusted by using Clustering Services . Implementing Clustering services is a difficult and costly implementation for only create a fault tolerant solution for the RD Broker.

Happily there is an alternative without buying a third party product by using hardware load balancers. Such a solution can also be considered for the still much used and implemented Windows 2003 Terminal Services, where the session broker service is not that sophisticated as in Windows 2008 R2.  Logically there are several hardware load balancers available, but most solutions are also expensive. The Kemp Load Balancers are really affordable and besides the offer fully integrated load balancing for RDS/TS. I implemented those load balancers for one of my customers and I will describe the real life experiences  of the implementation and usage of this solution.