I have always been a fan of two factor authentication, or 2FA in short. Almost all companies and customers I have worked for and with used it in some shape or form. Especially SMS based 2FA — from an administrative perspective it is easy to set up, configure and maintain (if it isn’t you might want to consider switching vendors) and next to that it is also extremely user friendly and secure, when properly implemented that is. And of course, there is no need for any additional (expensive) third party tokens.
Citrix NetScaler… The basics continued, part six. Content Switching!
If you have been following this series up till now, meaning you actually have read part one through five, then Content Switching should be a relatively easy concept to grasp. If you understand what a vServer is, how a service and server object are bound to each other and that we use monitors to constantly check if all is up and running then you are basically good to go. All we need now is a content switch vServer and a basic load balance setup and take it from there.
Citrix NetScaler… The basics continued, part five. Global Server Load Balancing!
From a NetScaler perspective Global Service Load Balancing (GSLB) can seem pretty intimidating. In short, GSLB is used as a way to manage and control the traffic flow between two (or more) separate physical locations (data centers) that are, in most cases, geographically dispersed. This can be for either load balancing purposes, high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recovery and so on. The mechanism behind GSLB is based on Microsoft DNS.
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.