I think we are all familiar with the term High Availability, or HA in short. It simply means that if a single machine or system fails we will have another equally configured system, or multiple, in standby mode or actively participating a.k.a. active / active, ready to take over when needed. This way we won’t loose any of the functionality that the failing, or failed, machine was providing us with. Which in the case of the NetScaler could be anything from a Gateway to Load Balancing, SSL offloading, Content Switching and more. Needless to say that the Citrix NetScaler has some nifty build-in HA capabilities as well.
Installing and configuring Citrix StoreFront, the web.config file!
Not to long ago StoreFront replaced WebInterface (yes, it’s still officially supported till June 2015) and with it came a bunch of cool new and (very) useful features like Receiver for web and StoreFront multi site configurations for example, offering load balancing and HA capabilities, user mapping, application subscription synchronisation, optimal NetScaler Gateway routing and a few more. Also, we are no longer bound to an external database, this is now taken care of by the build-in Windows Extensible Storage Engine. The downside, at least for me, is that most, but not all, of these features need to be configured and or modified in the web.config file, comparable to the WebInterface.conf file we have with WebInterface.
Configure StoreFront Multi-Site configurations
StoreFront Multi-Site configurations are still fairly unknown. I guess this has something to do with XenDesktop 7 still being relatively new (I know, it’s actually a StoreFront 2.0 feature) and with this I mean, the addition of the XenApp functionality. Since zones are no longer part of XenDesktop 7, or the Flex Management Architecture (they’ve disappeared together with the Local Host cache) you’ll have to, in most cases, create separate Sites to achieve similar results. Especially if Sites are geographically separated. When using StoreFront Multi-Site configurations we can still add in load balance and failover capabilities, even when using geographically ‘Dispersed’ Sites, just like we are (or were) used to with zones. No NetScaler required, although it’s probably a good idea to implement one anyway.