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#Citrix #StoreFront subscription database replication, #GSLB, #NetScaler
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:
Performance tuning #Citrix #Storefront – via @msandbu
Great article by Marius!
Read it and also have a look here at my previous post related to this: #Citrix #StoreFront Slowness, Join and Replication issue – check list!
This is something I wanted to write about for some time now, after the release of XenDesktop 7 but there are only 24 hours in one day so therefore I didn’t have the time before now 
But the purpose of this post is to really say that Storefront is slow…..
Don’t get me wrong it not about Citrix but the combination of Storefront and IIS that makes it a bit complex and therefore this makes it a bit slow.
Now there are a couple of tricks that can tune the perfomance.
Socket Pooling
In Web Interface you could enable it from the console, but in StoreFront we have to change it in the store config. By enabling socket pooling, Storefront maintaines a pool of sockets instead of creating a socket each time a new user connects, this will give a better performance for SSL based traffic.
You can enable this by opening the web.config file under C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Citrix\storename\
pooledSockets="off"
And Change this to “on” after that you have to do an IIS reset.
Application Initialization
(NOTE: Make sure you backup the config files before making alterations)
With Windows Server 2012 we have a new feature in IIS called always running on the application pools, this allowed for IIS to make everything ready after an application pool has restarted, before this the previous IIS was set to start loading after the first user tried to login after a restart. This caused the first user to login after an application pool has restarted to take loooong time to login. With Server 2012 IIS we can change the application pool to always running.
With 2008 R2 not so easy. But we can make it happen
First we need to download the application initialization feature from Microsoft
http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/application-initialization
After that is done and installed…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Finally multi-site and enterprise readiness of #StoreFront subscription DB! – #Citrix
This has been one of the things that many larger companies where asking for in the earlier versions of StoreFront (and to get rid of the SQL database of course). Before you could not in a supported/good/easy way get the user subscription database that contained all the items (apps and desktops) that the end-user had subscribed to replicated between sites and StoreFront groups.
For instance if you had a datacenter in Stockholm and then one in Beijing, and had a storefront server group at each datacenter and then used GSLB to load balance the StoreFront or Access Gateway access into those then users could travel and then end up on the other StoreFront group of servers and then didn’t have his/her subscriptions… this was not that good but with StoreFront 2.0 there is now support for how to synchronize the subscription database between the stores on the different groups/sites.
This is still a messy configuration I must say, how hard is it to build it into the console Citrix?!?! Same things as many of the config changes that you still have to do in web.config files…. really not that admin-friendly…
But here you find you how to setup the replication “jobs”:
And of course Citrix also added some other features in this new release:
What’s new
Separate database no longer required. The requirement for a separate database has been removed. Users’ application subscription data are stored locally and automatically replicated between StoreFront servers. For more information, see Plan your StoreFront deployment.
High availability and multi-site configuration. To enable load balancing and failover between the deployments providing the desktops and applications, you can define groupings and hierarchies, including specific backup deployments. You can restrict user access to specific resources by mapping deployments to Active Directory user groups. For more information, see StoreFront high availability and multi-site configuration.
Smart card authentication. StoreFront supports smart card authentication through both Receiver for Windows and NetScaler Gateway. Smart card authentication from desktop appliances and repurposed PCs through Desktop Appliance sites and XenApp Services URLs is also supported. For more information, see Use smart cards with StoreFront.
Receiver for HTML5 integration. You can configure Receiver for Web sites to enable users who cannot install Citrix Receiver to access their desktops and applications directly within HTML5-compatible web browsers. For more information, see Receiver for Web sites.
Desktop Appliance sites. You can enable users to access their desktops from non-domain-joined desktop appliances. The web browser on the appliance is configured to access the Desktop Appliance site for a store in full-screen mode at startup. For more information, see Desktop Appliance sites.
Receiver for Web site shortcuts. You can embed on your websites links to desktops and applications available through Receiver for Web sites. For more information, seeReceiver for Web sites.
XenMobile App Controller workflow integration. Receiver for Web site users can subscribe to applications to which you are managing access with App Controller user account management. For more information about App Controller user account management, see Configuring Applications for User Account Management.
#Sanbolic Brings Public Cloud Economics to the Enterprise – #Melio
Ok, I must say that this product is great!!! If you haven’t looked at it before then please do! And contact us at EnvokeIT if you want more details!
Sanbolic Enables Distributed Flash, SSD and HDD to Achieve Enterprise Systems Capability and Scale-Out In Server-Side and Commodity Storage Deployments
Waltham, MA – (March 18, 2013) – Sanbolic® today announced the general availability of its Melio version 5 (Melio5™) software – delivering distributed scale-out, high-availability and enterprise data services through software. Server-side flash has seen rapid adoption for applications such as hyperscale web serving, but limited adoption in general purpose enterprise applications. With the launch of Melio5, Sanbolic enables enterprise customers to dramatically improve their storage infrastructure economics by enabling server-side flash, SSD and HDD as primary persistent storage. Melio5 aggregates across nodes for scale-out and availability while providing RAID, remote replication, quality of Service (QoS), snapshots and systems functionality through a software layer on commodity hardware. This provides customers with the ability to deploy commodity and server-based storage architecture with similar economics and flexibility as public cloud data centers such as Google and Facebook.
With validation by hundreds of enterprise and government organizations running in production, Melio volume management and file system technology addresses the needs of high performing cost effective storage infrastructure on-premise. Melio5’s architecture is designed to scale up to 2,048 nodes and up to 65,000 storage devices enabling linear performance scalability in a cluster.
Melio5 also eliminates the need to deploy a redundant flash caching layer in front of legacy storage area network (SAN) hardware by directly incorporating flash into hybrid volumes and intelligently placing data based on file system access profiles. A hybrid volume will place random access data such as file system metadata on flash sectors while placing sequential data on low cost hard disk drives to greatly reduce the cost of capacity. The result is a highly scalable, high performance storage system, with a much lower cost than legacy storage arrays.
“Typically, server and disk drive vendors operate on gross margins in the 20-30% range. Storage array vendors, on the other hand, are often twice that or more,” said Eric Slack, Senior Analyst,Storage Switzerland. “Sanbolic’s approach leverages the architecture that the big social media and public cloud companies use, to fix this problem. By replacing storage arrays (and storage array margins) with commodity server and disk drive hardware and enabling it with intelligence through software, companies can significantly reduce storage infrastructure costs.”
Terri McClure, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), stated, “Sanbolic’s Melio5 software enables corporate users to take advantage of flash and SSD in conjunction with commodity hardware to create an intelligent, cost effective, and high performance storage architecture like the huge public cloud companies run, while still ensuring enterprise workload scalability and high availability.”
“Melio5 lets us solve one of the biggest challenges for our customers today – the upfront and management cost for storage – without sacrificing systems capability or performance. The Lego-like modular capability of Melio allows our customers to scale-out their storage and servers based on off-the-self commodity components, without downtime,” said Mattias Tornblom, CEO, EnvokeIT.
“LSI and Sanbolic’s shared vision and complementary products help customers to dramatically improve the performance, flexibility and economics of their on-premise storage infrastructure,” said Brent Blanchard, Senior Director of Worldwide Channel Sales and Marketing, LSI Corporation. “LSI’s Nytro™ family of server-side flash acceleration cards and leading SAS-based server storage connectivity solutions…
Continue reading here or here!
//Richard
#Citrix #StoreFront Slowness, Join and Replication issue – check list!
Ok, I guess that you may have seen issue with StoreFront before… and it you have not then good for U!
But in the case that you have experience it here are a couple of things that you can do and hopefully it solves your issue with slow StoreFront console startup, server join issues or replication issues. Sometimes I’ve seen that the join, replication and slowness is ok and the process goes through. But then all of a sudden you get an error and the propagation fails… and this can be because of a timeout in the StoreFront process that you’ve initiated.
I already assume that you’ve checked the basic stuff.. that the servers can reach each other (ping server name and FQDN etc. and that there are no FW issues)….
You may have an issue because you/your server cannot reach the Internet, and some of the components of the product is signed with SSL certificates and StoreFront will try to perform a check whether the publishers certificate is ok or not. So if your servers are behind a proxy serevr that you usually configure in your browser to be able to connect from your companies internal network to the Internet then you should do the following.
1. Log on to your first StoreFront server and create a copy of the original aspnet.config file under C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 (verify which framework version that your app is using in IIS and modify that appropriate aspnet.config file, more info about this change can also be found here and is for Web Interface but is also applicable to StoreFront)
2. Open Notepad as an Admin (if you have UAC of course enabled) and open the asp net.config file
It will have the content as described by the picture above, add this line to it: <generatePublisherEvidence enabled=”false”/>
The IT Melting Pot! 