You could look into Database replication, log shipping etc. It's not difficult to failover the Citrix servers to another SQL server, and even then you have 96 hour in which the DataStore can be offline. Joe _____ From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Schill, Mark Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 8:24 AM To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [THIN] Re: Web Interface - Load Balancing between farms In our case I don't think that the hardware load balancing equipment is the issue. The problem is that hardware load balancing will load balance the web interface servers and not the MetaFrame farms. So 1000 people could launch the application via another means like a custom ICA connection or Program neighborhood and connect to Farm B. The load balancers would still treat each web interface server as equal load. The same would go if 1000 users logged into the web site and only the ones directed to Farm A actually launched the application. FYI. We have apparently have had issues with Data Collectors and Data Stores crapping out. We can do multiple Data Collectors and multiple database servers, but it still comes down to a single database and we have a farm do down because the database got corrupted. Mark E. Schill Senior Analyst, Citrix Technical Services (404) 735-9520 Mark.Schill@xxxxxxxxxxxx _____ From: Joe Shonk [mailto:joe.shonk@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 11:09 AM To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [THIN] Re: Web Interface - Load Balancing between farms The cost is relative. Most Enterprises are more than will to invest in a pair of hardware load-balancers in order to provide higher availability of services. Joe _____ From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Evan Mann Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 7:51 AM To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [THIN] Re: Web Interface - Load Balancing between farms Talk about expensive. Load balancing hardware is not cheap. _____ From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Joe Shonk Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 10:49 AM To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [THIN] Re: Web Interface - Load Balancing between farms Why make it difficult. Just setup two WI servers (One for each farm) and use a Cisco CSS to load-balance the two WI. Half will use the Published apps from one WI server, and half will use the other. If one farm goes down, the other farm is available (I am assuming this is for Redundancy/DR otherwise it doesn't make any sense to LB the same application across two farms.) You should also look into using multiple zones instead of multiple farms. Joe _____ From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark Schill Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2005 6:28 PM To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [THIN] Web Interface - Load Balancing between farms Greetings, I have a requirement to develop a solution that would load balance an application through Web Interface to two different farms. So for example a user would click on Notepad and the Web Interface would calculate the load on each of the farms for the Notepad application and direct the user to that farm to launch the application. Don't need anything fancy for the load balancing mechanism. Application session count would probably be ok. I just read through the WI 4.0 SDK and am pretty sure I can code something, but I wanted to check and make sure that someone else hasn't already tackled this problem before I got down and dirty in coding something myself. -- Mark E. Schill