Citrix/TS Load Balancing & Multiple Sessions

I need a little bit of understanding here and I dont know if its a
Citrix thing or something I can do with TS. I have a Citrix MPS3 farm
with a published desktop load balanced over 3 servers. There is a need
for the user to potentially use more than 1 session and therefore may
have 2 or more sessions open on multiple servers.

This in turn leads to the scenario that if they disconnect these
sessions (for talking sake 4 sessions) all at once, come in the next
monring, the 4 sessions may be in a disconnected state over the 3
servers.

Now from my understanding of it and the limited testing I dont kind of
confirms this. The Citrix Load Manager detects multiple sessions across
the farm and points the session to the last disconnected one. If that
particular server has more than 1 session disconnected for that user it
will prompt which one to select....but only the sessions for that
particular server not those in a disconnected state in the rest of the
farm. This is obviously TS functionality.

Im trying to get the harmony between the 2 products to achieve the
ultimate goal of the user logging in, a detection process occurs which
says there are 2 or more disconnected sessions spread over the
different servers in the farm, and the user is ultimately given the
choice which one to connect to.

I think this is more Citrix orientated than anything, the reason I post
here is ive also been reading about similar topics in TS relating to
NLB affinity and Session Directory and wondered if they would help.

Any help appreciated.

I personally schedule a reboot of my Citrix farm at 3AM to avoid problems
like this.
--
Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
http://www.sessioncomputing.com


"Stu" wrote:

> I need a little bit of understanding here and I dont know if its a
> Citrix thing or something I can do with TS. I have a Citrix MPS3 farm
> with a published desktop load balanced over 3 servers. There is a need
> for the user to potentially use more than 1 session and therefore may
> have 2 or more sessions open on multiple servers.
>
> This in turn leads to the scenario that if they disconnect these
> sessions (for talking sake 4 sessions) all at once, come in the next
> monring, the 4 sessions may be in a disconnected state over the 3
> servers.
>
> Now from my understanding of it and the limited testing I dont kind of
> confirms this. The Citrix Load Manager detects multiple sessions across
> the farm and points the session to the last disconnected one. If that
> particular server has more than 1 session disconnected for that user it
> will prompt which one to select....but only the sessions for that
> particular server not those in a disconnected state in the rest of the
> farm. This is obviously TS functionality.
>
> Im trying to get the harmony between the 2 products to achieve the
> ultimate goal of the user logging in, a detection process occurs which
> says there are 2 or more disconnected sessions spread over the
> different servers in the farm, and the user is ultimately given the
> choice which one to connect to.
>
> I think this is more Citrix orientated than anything, the reason I post
> here is ive also been reading about similar topics in TS relating to
> NLB affinity and Session Directory and wondered if they would help.
>
> Any help appreciated.
>
>

The farm is on a scheduled reboot but if you have a load balanced farm,
by design it can still split the sessions over 2 or more servers. The
question is there a way to consolidate the sessions on a reconnect and
give the end user a choice of which session to reconnect to on the farm.

You can consolidate the sessions for each user to one box, i.e. use
sessionsharing if you set the encryption level, screen resolution and color
depth the same on each published application. Ideally you want one user to
work on one machine to minimize the total session count. Ths way if you
publish word, excel and outlook, if a user has word open and then launches
outlook it'll open with the same session id on the same citrix server.

--
Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
http://www.sessioncomputing.com


"Stuart Graham" wrote:

> The farm is on a scheduled reboot but if you have a load balanced farm,
> by design it can still split the sessions over 2 or more servers. The
> question is there a way to consolidate the sessions on a reconnect and
> give the end user a choice of which session to reconnect to on the farm.
>
>

Hi Patrick,

We are using Published Desktops here....the boxes are exact replica's
of each other...can you still achieve this?

If you're using published desktops then why do people have multiple
disconnected sessions? Maybe you could limit them to one logon, so logging
on at a second computer would grab their original session (it does this w/
RDP, not sure about ICA). You could have people logon via the Web Interface,
so if they logon a second time it will transfer the original session to the
second computer.


--
Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
http://www.sessioncomputing.com


"Stuart Graham" wrote:

> Hi Patrick,
>
> We are using Published Desktops here....the boxes are exact replica's
> of each other...can you still achieve this?
>
>

There is business reasons why they would have multiple sessions. I
appreciate the help but im not really looking for workarounds, I want
to know definitively if there is a way to achieve what im trying to
achieve.