The IT Melting Pot!

Ok, so we’ve all started to use StoreFront (or have U?) and find out that there are A LOT of things that you have to do in order to get it to work as you most probably want it to.

This post is more around how you ensure that the StoreFront architecture supports an enterprise with multiple sites while still having a concistent end-user experience.

Just imagine that you’ve built your architecture out in a true high availability manner with global server load balancing across all products used in the stack to deliver your Windows apps and desktops to your end-users. It may look something similar to this:

In this view you can see that we’ve setup GSLB to ensure that external (Internet) connected users  and devices are being connected to a NetScaler Gateway vServer in either London or Miami, and from there the NetScaler and the session profile that communicates with StoreFront (SF1 and 2 in each site) is also load balanced using GSLB to ensure high availability. So everything seems good, right! But no… consider that you as an end-user is being connected to the Miami site and that StoreFront group that has a subscription database containing all the apps and desktops etc. that you have selected and added to your workspace.  You will see all these icons by default now when you login to Miami, but you will not see them in the case Miami goes down for some reason or if you travel to London and then gets connected to that StoreFront group as I try to show by this picture:

As you see in step 6 the Miami site either goes down or the user jumps on to a flight and then by GSLB proximity is now being sent to London, and his/her Outlook icon is not there if they login!

So how do we ensure that we get get a seamless experience no matter where you are or in the event of a disaster? That we can accomplish with the long expected StoreFront replication “feature” that finally is here:

So how do you then make this happen? Well, you follow the steps in the following article and that will solve this dilemma.

To configure subscription synchronization

Is this simple and enterprise ready? Well NOOO.. Citrix you must please focus on making it easier to implement and operate your products. All the manual steps and config you need to do for StoreFront to work well should be added into the console and should be possible to save as a template or similar that you can export from your development/acceptance environment and just apply in production after it’s been tested and verified that it works.

//Richard