There are different ways on how you can load balance TFTP. Below are the ways on how you can do so:
DNS Round Robin Entry DHCP with Multiple Entries Provisioning Services PXE Broadcast Provisioning Services Boot Device Manager NetScaler Use Source IP (USIP) NetScaler Direct Server Return (DSR) NetScaler Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) Check out this document on detailed explanation: HA for TFTP with PVS
High Availability for PVS vDisks:
Citrix Provisioning Server (PVS) streams the contents of the vDisk to the Client VMs (target device) on demand, in real time. The Client VMs boot directly across the network and behaves as if it is running from its local drive. This article talks about various steps involved in network boot and how the vDisk is streamed.
Citrix Provisioning Services Network Boot Process
VM/Target Device is powered on
Device BIOS configured to perform a network boot
Subnet - is a range of IP addresses determined by part of an address (often called the network address) and a subnet mask (netmask). For example, if the netmask is 255.255.255.0 (or /24 for short), and the network address is 192.168.10.0, then that defines a range of IP addresses 192.168.10.0 through 192.168.10.255. Shorthand for writing that is 192.168.10.0/24.
VLAN - A good way to think of this is “switch partitioning.” Let’s say you have an 8 port switch that is VLAN-able.
Farm:
A farm represents the top level of a Provisioning Services infrastructure. Farms provide a “Farm Administrator” with a method of representing, defining, and managing logical groups of Provisioning Services components into sites.
All sites within a farm share that farm’s Microsoft SQL database. A farm also includes a Citrix License Server, local or network shared storage, and collections of target devices. The farm is initially configured when you run the Configuration Wizard.
PVS benefits:
Storage foot print would be very small for PVS. Using cache on ram, would give a better performance on overall VDI performance. Citrix Admins have complete control over user’s VDI. Windows updates in normal scenario take lot of network bandwidth and storage - With PVS, only one image should be updated, rest of all are done with a reboot. With dynamic VDIs, we can power manage them as per user shift timings.
PVS Services:
SOAP Service: Simple object access protocol. This is the XML based service which communicate between applications. Soap Service is for PVS Console and management operations only and will not effect streaming at all. If this service is stopped any activity that involves the PVS GUI console will stop. You cannot connect to your PVS environment using PVS console. Soap service is for console to communicate with the pvs server.
We have two vDisk modes:
Standard Image – Select this mode if a vDisk is shared by multiple target devices (write-cache options enabled). Private Image – Select this mode if a vDisk is only used by a single target device (read/write access is enabled). Standard Image mode Standard Image mode allows multiple target devices to stream from a single vDisk image at the same time. This mode reduces the amount of vDisk management and reduces storage requirements.
Follow below steps to load balance citrix delivery controllers with netscaler:
Make sure you have snip configured in netscaler. Create monitor using monitor type as citrix-xd-ddc. You can configure interval and time-out values if you need. Check validate credentials check box and enter your citrix site, service account credentials. Goto servers option and add all your citrix delivery controllers there. Click services option and create load balancing service for each delivery controller by specifying your servers from above step 3 and add monitor from step 2.
Below are the steps to perform to point your on-prem VDA to WEM on citrix cloud:
Login to citrix cloud portal and setup resource location. Download cloud connector software to a windows server machine, and install it. Connect to your cloud account after cloud connector software is installed. Now copy the WEM admx and adml files on a win 10 machine, to c:\windows\policydefinitions or copy them to your AD server and configure a GPO to point to your wem agent on win10 to cloud connectors.
some or all steps are required to add external authentication on netscaler 12 and above:
Create LDAP Server (authentication server). Create LDAP policy. Bind the LDAP policy globally. Add AD groups to netscaler to restrict access to management access. Optional Restrict normal users to netscaler gateway. Optional Create LDAP Server (authentication server):
To create LDAP server follow below steps. This LDAP server can be used for authentication for all users who login to netscaler portal (netscaler gateway) and for administrators who can login to netscaler management ip for admin purposes.
