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Citrix server perference and failover, in the Citrix XenApp / Presentation Server forum on BrianMadden.com

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rkirmeier posted on 11-19-2008 10:24 AM

Hey guys/gals,

First post here but the forum has been priceless!

Here is my problem... We are setting up a Citrix farm. They will have 2 Citrix PS 4.5 servers with a handful of published applications. We have some DOS based applications in addition to some normal Windows applications. There is an odd issue that if the DOS app is opened first the same user cannot open one of the Windows applications. If this Windows application is opened first everything is fine. If anyone has idea how to resolve this that would be great but I have a work around but not sure if it can be done or how.

Here is what I wanted to do... I would like to force the applications to open on different servers which is easy but I would like them to open on the alternate server in the event of a failure. I was thinking this could be done with Zones but after looking into Zones it appears this would not work.

Any ideas or thoughts on resolving this would be great!

Thanks,

RK

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Yaseen Sarwar replied on 11-19-2008 12:02 PM

You could disable session sharing to force applications into there own unique session is one solution.

I don't see why you can't create a failover policy.  However it only works with the Web Interface or PNAgent and not the neightbourhood client.

Citrix Customer Advisory Community

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So, you launch the DOS app, then try the windows app... Then what happens? The user get an error, etc? Can you elaborate?

Zones are meant to control communication in a farm where servers are seperated by a WAN or slow link.

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We are using PNA but I don't know how to setup a failover policy. I don't see anything referring to failover within Policies under the Citrix Presentation Server Console. Please elaborate...

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The Windows application is an app based off FoxPro. If I recall the issue is that if the DOS app is opened first the FoxPro app just displays a white screen and does not do anything else.

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To my knowledge there is not 'failover' feature in Citrix. You might be able to do something with load evaluators. But there is no option to say if server A is down, use server B. Maybe someone here will prove me wrong though.

Personally I would work on fixing the Windows app issue rather then use a work-a-round. Can you publish a full desktop, launch the DOS app, then the Windows based FoxPro app? Does that work OK?

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Failover is pretty much automatic as long as an app is assigned to two or more servers. But if I want an app to always execute on a single server unless that sever is down I'm not sure there is a way to do that.

As for "fixing" the app it's not an option...

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I disabled session sharing via a reg key and that resolved the app issue. Thanks guys!

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did you try using an isolatation environment for the dos app to run in? that might eliminate the conflict and enable you to utilize session sharing, which eliminates the need to establish a new session for each app. (which runs a lot more exe's and consumes more resources)
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I looked into application isolation and determined it would not solve the problem. Although I didn't try it to be sure I felt sure it would not fix the issue because application isolation was more for isolating registry and dlls. The problem is that when the DOS app is opened it is initializing the user environment based on the requirements of the DOS app and the windows app appearently needs more colors/higher res or something like that. If you open the Windows app first everything worked fine. This system with 2 very nice servers only supports about 50 users and only 10 or so run the DOS app so disabling session sharing really wasn't a big deal. Had this been 1000+ users then we would have a different feeling about disabling session sharing...

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