Lately, more and more customers are asking for a solution to manage their mobile devices. While discussing the Citrix XenMobile architecture question regarding High Availability (HA) and Load balancing (LB) are crucial for a solid design. How to configure the Citrix AppController for HA & LB is pretty straightforward and well documented. The Citrix Device Manager however is a different ball game and the documentation isn’t very clear. A full architecture with High Availability should look something like this:

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The eDocs states:

Configure the Windows servers as a cluster, while the installation instructions tell you to configure a Tomcat cluster

The Citrix Reference Architecture for XenMobile 8.7 doesn’t mentions a Windows Cluster.

can be configured with multiple servers load-balanced behind a NetScaler appliance or another hardware load-balancing solution. The Device Managers work in an active-active configuration. In this environment, ports 80, 443, and 8443 are load-balanced. For SSL connections (ports 443 and 8443), make sure to turn on SSL session persistence in the load balancing rules. XDM requires a shared SQL server and NTP configured on each server.

At first I was a bit confused about all the different parts of information, what information is correct and what information is not? I contacted Citrix hoping to get a straightforward answer. Citrix came up with the following high level guidelines:

  1. Install for example two standalone XDM server (No MS Clustering)
  2. Place a network load balancer in front of the XDM server. In my case this will be a Netscaler (NS).
  3. Install/Configure the first XDM server and LB on the NS with only one XDM server active
  4. Test if the setup works as a expected
  5. Install/Configure the second XDM server and cluster (Yes, a Tomcat cluster) the two XDM servers as described in the installation guide (forget the part about the MS clustering).
  6. Configure the NS LB to support both XDM servers (Don’t forget session persistence)
  7. Retest if the setup still works as expected

Following this guidelines I was able create a fully working load balanced configuration for the XDM servers. For information about scaling a XenMobile environment take a look at this Citrix Blog!

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