Lab Question

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You have recently become the administrator of a large Citrix environment that is distributed across four different geographical locations. Each location has between 20 and 30 Citrix servers that are used for access to client data. Each location houses data for different clients, and all the users in your company need access to client data at each location. In addition to internal users, clients will need to access their own data using Citrix.

The consultants who deployed the Citrix solution for your company created server farms in each of the four locations. A customer server farm and an employee server farm were created in each of the four locations, for a total of eight Citrix server farms. Being a new Citrix administrator in this environment, you notice a few problems right away. Users cannot figure out which server farm to use for which clients. In addition, your helpdesk does not know which server farm people are using when they call in with support issues.

You want to improve this environment and make it more supportable by providing all Citrix users with a standard client configuration that allows them to access client data at each of the four locations. You also want to give the helpdesk a standard way of emulating users who call for support. How will you go about implementing these improvements?

Answers

 

The first thing you will need to do is create ICA gateways to and from each location so that the Citrix servers in each spot can communicate with the servers from the other three locations. Keep in mind that ICA gateways are not transitive, so you will have to create three gateways at each location. Once all the Citrix servers can communicate with each other, they can be consolidated into one server farm. If you create a single server farm that spans all four locations, you can allow users to access resources in all those locations by creating a connection to only one server farm. Using the features of load balancing, you can create published applications that exist only on the servers in the location of the client's data. If all Citrix users are accessing the same server farm, your helpdesk will be able to provide a higher level of support. By creating a connection to the single server farm, helpdesk staff can emulate any user's environment by simply logging onto the farm with the user's credentials.

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