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18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
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CITRIX NETSCALER
How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 usinga Citrix NetScalerBy Jason Samuel on June 2, 2015
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Citrix Director is a very important piece of any XenDesktop or XenApp environment. You
don’t want to have a single point of failure for this, especially if your help desk relies on it. I
saw a Twitter post the other day asking how to load balance Director 7.6 and figured I’d
write up this guide. I also have a couple of BONUS tricks that will make Director easier to
use for your end users.
Citrix Director should not be used on your Delivery Controllers in large production
environments. It’s a pretty heavy web app and the more users you have using it the more
load there will be on your Delivery Controllers. The best thing to do is setup separate
dedicated web servers for the Director role. Also note it’s best practice to have a separate
SQL databases for Site configuration, Logging, and Monitoring but most all 7.6
deployments I’ve seen in the real world have it all combined (and I blame the Citrix
installation wizard for this, they should made it easier for folks to understand and change
during installation). In this example I’m going to assume you have setup 2 dedicated
Director 7.6 servers and connected them to your Delivery Controllers. On the NetScaler,
the config is no different than any other website you would load balance:
1. Create 2 servers. In this example I have created srv_dir01 and srv_dir02:
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18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
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2. Now create a service group. You can use HTTP or SSL. In this example I have created
svcgrp_director and made it HTTP.
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18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
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3. Now add your 2 members (the 2 servers you created in step 1):
18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
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4. Make them port 80 if using HTTP or 443 if SSL:
18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
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5. Now add an HTTP monitor
18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
http://www.jasonsamuel.com/2015/06/02/how-to-load-balance-citrix-director-7-6-using-a-citrix-netscaler/ 6/15
18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
http://www.jasonsamuel.com/2015/06/02/how-to-load-balance-citrix-director-7-6-using-a-citrix-netscaler/ 7/15
6. Now create a load balanced vserver and make the protocol HTTP or SSL and choose
the appropriate port depending on what you have done so far. In this example HTTP and
port 80:
7. Now bind the service group you created in the previous step:
18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
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18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
http://www.jasonsamuel.com/2015/06/02/how-to-load-balance-citrix-director-7-6-using-a-citrix-netscaler/ 9/15
8. Set the persistence to Source IP. You can also use Cookie Insert with Source IP as
backup if you prefer. I usually only use Cookie Insert for external websites where you may
have users using a forward proxy. Set the cookie timeout to 0 so the NetScaler doesn’t
have to consume resources keeping track of the cookie if you use this method. When users
close their browser the cookie expires automatically. For an internal website like Director,
Source IP should be just fine for you. I left the default 2 min timeout in this example:
9. Your load balanced vserver should be Up at this point. Create a nice friendly name in
DNS for your vserver IP like “http://director.yourdomain.com” and try it out.
18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
http://www.jasonsamuel.com/2015/06/02/how-to-load-balance-citrix-director-7-6-using-a-citrix-netscaler/ 10/15
1. You’ll notice if you navigate to “http://director.yourdomain.com” you’ll get the IIS start
page. You don’t want your end users to have to remember to type out
“http://director.yourdomain.com/Director” to get to the actual Director login page. That gets
annoying real quick:
2. The easy thing to do is use a NetScaler Responder policy to redirect users to the right
URL. Go to your Responder Actions and create a new redirect action. In this example I
have created resact_director_redirect and it redirects to:
"http://director.yourdomain.com/Director/"
(yes, leave the quotes just like in the screenshot:
BONUS #1
18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
http://www.jasonsamuel.com/2015/06/02/how-to-load-balance-citrix-director-7-6-using-a-citrix-netscaler/ 11/15
3. Now create a Responder Policy and bind your new Action to it. My policy is set to:
HTTP.REQ.URL.CONTAINS("Director").NOT
which means if the URL does not contain “Director”, then it’s going to redirect to the
Director home page.
18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
http://www.jasonsamuel.com/2015/06/02/how-to-load-balance-citrix-director-7-6-using-a-citrix-netscaler/ 12/15
4. Now go bind your new Responder Policy to your Load Balanced vserver:
6. Now try hitting “http://director.yourdomain.com” in your browser and voila, it will
automatically redirect to “http://director.yourdomain.com/Director/”
18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
http://www.jasonsamuel.com/2015/06/02/how-to-load-balance-citrix-director-7-6-using-a-citrix-netscaler/ 13/15
Do you use Director 7.6 in a NOC or put it up on a monitor that sits in a public place always
displaying your Citrix environment stats? You’ll notice that Director 7.6 will automatically
kick you out after about 4 hours of idle time on the website. Unless you have someone in
front of the screen all the time to keep typing in credentials, this can get very annoying. To
modify this value to something longer just edit the Director web.config file and edit the
cookie timeout value for the session. If using Server 2012 make sure you open Notepad in
“Run as Administrator” mode then open this:
C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Director\web.config
and head down to this section:
Change the session state timeout value from 245 minutes to whatever your preference is.
Example, for 7 days it would be 10080 minutes. The lowest you can go with Director 7.6
(without modifying some other settings) is 11 minutes otherwise you will get this message
immediately after logging in:
Note that even setting it this low it will popup with the message after a few min and kick
you out around the 6 minute mark. So if have a reason to get very precise there are some
BONUS #2
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1011
<sessionState mode="Custom" cookieless="UseCookies" regenerateExpiredSessionId="true" timeout="245" cookieName="DESKTOPDIRECTORSESSION" customProvider="Citrix.Dmc.WebService.CustomSessionStateProvider"> <providers> <add name="Citrix.Dmc.WebService.CustomSessionStateProvider" type="Citrix.Dmc.WebService.CustomSessionStateProvider" /> </providers> </sessionState>
18.11.2015 How to load balance Citrix Director 7.6 using a Citrix NetScaler – JasonSamuel.com
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other settings you would have to modify in the web config or even easier just calculate and
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Jason Samuel is an Infrastructure Architect living in Houston, TX with a primary
focus on mobility, virtualization, and cloud technologies from Citrix, VMware, &
Microsoft. He also has an extensive background in web architecture and
information security. In his spare time he enjoys writing how-to articles and
evangelizing the technologies he works with.
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