First for the App-V Management Servers, they are just web services that also point to the AppVManagement database. There’s really no need to load balance these but what I do is create a CNAME for these. In this post we will go through configuring load balancing for the Publishing Servers, you could use any number of solutions. In this example, I will use Citrix Netscalers. You could use this is conjunction with whatever you use for DNS or GSLB within the Netscalers themselves.
In this post we will go through configuring load balancing for the Publishing Servers, you could use any number of solutions. In this example, I will use Citrix Netscalers. You could use this in conjunction with whatever you use for DNS or GSLB within the Netscalers themselves. In this post, I’ll cover adding a DNS A record like suggested in Hal’s post but in reality, in my production setup I actually used GSLB in NetScaler.
Before getting into the Netscaler configuration, you can create a DNS A record with an available IP address.
Navigate to Traffic Management –> Server and click Add
Enter the name and IP address of the Publishing Servers and click Create.
Repeat these steps for each server.
Next navigate to Traffic Management –> Load Balancing –> Service Groups and click Add.
Create a group for App-V with the TCP protocol option.
When created, click Members.
Select Servers.
Add the publishing servers to the group and click OK.
Click Done.
Service Group is created.
Navigate to Traffic Management–>Load Balancing–>Virtual Servers and click Add
Name the Virtual server, provide the port we set during the Publishing Server installs and our DNS associated IP address.
Click on No Load Balancing Virtual Server ServiceGroup Binding option.
Choose our Service Group and click Bind.
Click OK
Click Done
We should have our Servers listed in the NetScalers, a Service Group containing those servers as members and a valid VIP bound to that group of servers, all faced by our DNS entry for appv.homelab.com.
That’s it, now you can deploy your App-V 5.1 Client pointing to the above VIP for the publishing server URLs. If you are deploying with XenApp, you will want to go into Studio and add a publishing server for Studio to pull from.
Note: At the time I set this up. Studio could not use the VIP for pulling the App-v apps. It only worked by pointing right to a single server’s URL. This is fine since it will only refresh whenever an admin tries to discover apps in Studio anyway. The VIP URL can still be used as expected on the session hosts. If deploying with Citrix, there are also a few Citrix specific cmdlets for setting the refresh behavior.
For more info on deploying the client, I have an old post HERE. It’s not a great post, to be honest. If there’s demand, I can re-do it.
