Is it wise to Virtualize (VMWARE) WI 4.5 or would it be better to use physical HW. The servers will be load balanced and will handle over 10000 users. If all of the specs are identical then why not? I am also considering Secure GW too, but I want to make sure the decision going to VM is a good one. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Hi,
I can't say for sure just how well web interface will scale as I've never consulted on a design for that many users before. The number of farms and XenApp servers will also have an impact on scaling your WI servers.
However, I think you are safe to virtualize web interface as you'll more easily be able to scale out (add WI VMs) or scale up (add vCPUs or RAM) as needed.
I would definitely recommend that you go with redundant hardware load balancers (consider NetScaler) to maximize performance and fault tolerance. For this large a deployment, load balanced CAGs are going to be a necessity too (mostly for performance) as you'll need to encrypt traffic end to end, minimize your exposure on the perimeter, use advanced accees controls, and do some end point checking. I don't think you can get away with using CSG for performance reasons. The CAGs would be best placed in a DMZ with dual firewalls. You'll also want to have load balanced, dedicated XenApp servers that do nothing but handle authentication traffic (XML and STA too) and reference multiple XML servers (STAs) in the WI configs for fault tolerance.
You might want to review these articles and links:
http://support.citrix.com/servlet/KbServlet/download/9766-102-14863/AG_AAC_WI_Failover_v1.pdf
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX114670 (This one refers to CSG, but I think the scaling information will be helpful to you)
http://www.applicationdelivery.co.uk/blog/leew/citrix-access-gateway-advanced-load-balancing-contingency-and-high-availability-design-options/ (This one has a decent diagram and a brief discussion)
Sounds like a fun and challenging project, good luck!
Alan Osborne
President (MCSE, CCNA, VCP, CCA)
VCIT Consulting - Citrix/Terminal Services Remote Desktop Solutions for SMB
VCIT website My Blog
if you use VMWARE, you couldn't use the cheapest load balancing solution - Windows network load balancing. Then you need a CAGEE ore other Hardware for loadbalancing.
We use Windows-NLB for a higher availability, not for performance scaling.
We are using a F5 to load balence and running our 4 WI on VM with no issues. We have 2000 users.