If you're using the Personalization Server feature (and it sounds like you are), you need to be aware that if you lose this area of the environment, not only do you get no customization of user profile, session or any of their applications, you take the risk of overwriting the Personalization data with default data and causing all sorts of problems for your user base.
With this in mind, you'll want heavy redundancy on both the SQL backend and in the web services that facilitate communication with the SQL backend. AppSense supports clustering, replication, mirroring and all the other usual SQL redundancy features. You will also probably want to configure some failover in the web services that provide the Management Server site and the Personalization Server site. There are some non-default options within Personalization itself I'd recommend - Offline Resiliency ensures that in the event of a database outage, the client caches Personalization data and resyncs once the database is available. I'd also recommend enabling either the web portal and/or the self-service profile reset features, which again will dictate the sizing of your database depending on how many archives you keep. See this article for a discussion of AppSense database sizing - http://appsensebigot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/appsense-management-server-and_13.html There are also a few gotchas around AppSense and PVS I'd want to bear in mind - http://appsensebigot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/using-appsense-with-citrix-provisioning.htmland some AV considerations - http://appsensebigot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/antivirus-exclusions-for-appsense.html I'd also recommend you seriously consider using the Performance Manager feature of AppSense. It can eke out up to 40% higher user density on XenApp platforms - a serious ROI if ever there was one. On the XenApp side, I think Web has more than adequately covered what you need. I'll back him up on the fact that StoreFront (I dare speak the name) is not really fit for purpose yet. If you need any more advice on the AppSense side of things feel free to shoot me an email offline, although at your current stage I don't think you need do much other than scope for the heavy redundancy in the SQL side of things. Cheers, JR On 28 February 2013 17:29, Sean Martin <seanmarti...@gmail.com> wrote: > We haven't gone through the low-level design process for each of the > deliverables yet, so I am not sure if we're using that feature. Is that a > part of the Environment Manager? Our implementation of AppSense is purely > for a profile management solution because of the garbage that roaming > profiles makes us deal with in our current environment. > > - Sean > > On Feb 28, 2013, at 8:03 AM, kz2...@googlemail.com wrote: > > Are you using the AppSense Personalization Server feature? That's going to > have a big influence on your requirements if you are. > > Sent from my Blackberry, which may be an antique but delivers email > RELIABLY > ------------------------------ > *From: * Sean Martin <seanmarti...@gmail.com> > *Date: *Thu, 28 Feb 2013 07:58:09 -0900 > *To: *NT System Admin Issues<ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com> > *ReplyTo: * "NT System Admin Issues" < > ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com> > *Subject: *Vmware Design for XenApp 6.5 w/PVS > > Hello everyone, > > Let me start first by apologize for the length of this message. In my > pursuit of providing all of the relevant information I fully expect for > this to be a bit long winded. > > We're in the final planning stages of a migration from a purely physical > XenApp 5 on Windows 2003 environment to a virtualized XenApp 6.5 with > Provisioning Services environment on ESXi 5.0. I was hoping I could toss > out our initial design and gather some feedback. > > Our current environment consists of a single farm, two sites, and just > under 200 physical servers. That includes the SQL server, data collectors, > existing Web Interface servers, licensing server and all of the > presentation servers. We currently support 12 application silos. The > purpose of each silo varies from application compatibility issues, business > unit requirements, performance requirements, etc. At our peak, we support > approximately 1400 concurrent sessions. This is the number we've used to > design our future environment. > > The new environment will consist of a dedicated vSphere Cluster for the > XenApp servers (using provisioning services). Other supporting services > (SQL Server, zone data collectors, licensing server, etc.) will be > supported in a general vSphere cluster. Web Interface will be migrated to > NetScaler Appliances. We will also be deploying AppSense Environment > Manager and using AppDNA to validate application compatibility. > > Anyway, my specific responsibility is to forcast the infrastructure > requirements and work directly with our Citrix Admins. I used the following > article as the primary reference material for starting our design. We > decided to plan conservatively and base our consolidation ratios with a 20 > users per guest target. The host config I've decided on are Dell PowerEdge > R820s with Quad E5-4640 2.4GHz 8 core procs and 384GB RAM. Using the > recommendation of 4vCPUs per guest we can support 16VMs per host which > equates to 320 users per host. 5 hosts will allow us to support a peak of > 1600 concurrent user sessions. We will purchase 6 hosts to maintain our N+1 > cluster design standards. I dediced to bump the RAM per host considerably > to allow for increased guest allocation. We support over 200 published > applications in our environment, which are distributed amongst physical > server silos currently. One of our goals with PVS is to consolidate the > applications into as few images as possible si we want to certain we have > the hardware resources to support the guests. Each host will include a > FusionIO IO Drive to support maximum IO requirements and eliminate IO > contention on our SAN during large scale provisioning. All of our hosts > leverage infiniband with 80Gbps throughput for ethernet and native FC > connectivity. > > > > http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/01/07/whats-the-optimal-xenapp-6-5-vm-configuration/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CitrixBlogs+%28Citrix+Blogs%29 > > So after reading all of that I feel like I'm bragging. However, I have a > fundemental concern because even though we are being very conservative and > are likely procuring more resources than necessary, I have no reliable > means of validating the capabilities of this proposed environment vs. our > current workloads. My experience with Vmware tells me that even though the > aforementioned article suggests a 4 vCPU per guest configuration, we'll > likely start with a single vCPU configuration and do our best at initial > scalability testing while keeping an eye on CPU waits. Should we find > guests perform optimally with few vCPUs than that will just increase our > consolidation ratios. > > I'm hoping some of you out there with a lot of XenApp experience (Webster, > James, etc.:) ) can either point out any major gaps in the initial hardware > design or hopefully validate that we're more than likely over provisioning > hardware resources. > > - Sean > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ > > --- > To manage subscriptions click here: > http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ > or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com > with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ > > --- > To manage subscriptions click here: > http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ > or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com > with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ > > --- > To manage subscriptions click here: > http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ > or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com > with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin > -- *James Rankin* Technical Consultant (ACA, CCA, MCTS) http://appsensebigot.blogspot.co.uk ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
