Off-Line Load Evaluator Technique

This article will help you to simplify supportability and reduce end user downtime for applications in your Citrix Farm, as well as save you valuable support time.

Citrix Farms large and small will benefit from this information. However large Citrix Farms will benefit the most from using this technique.

Imagine you have a silo of 20 Citrix servers hosting MS Office 2000, Lotus Notes 6.5, a Terminal Emulator of some sort, and a few other misc applications.

You have configured each of the servers to use the same Citrix Farm load evaluator. Everything is running super, you have all of the best practice configuration settings installed and configured and are using Active Directory Group Policies with loopback processing, and all is well.

Then the helpdesk or Customer Support Center pages you with,

“Lotus Notes is unavailable”.

1. What would you do ? Well you could determine which Citrix Server has stopped responding and go to each of the published application objects in the Citrix Management Console and remove this misbehaved Server from each of them. This could take a little bit of time , especially if you have 10, 15, 20 or more applications published on this one misbehaving Citrix server.

2. OR you could go to the server object (for the server that is misbehaving) in the Citrix Management Console and right click, go to properties, MetaFrame XP Settings and uncheck “Enable logons to this server”.

3. OR you can have a pre-configured Load Evaluator named “OFF-Line” that is configured to use scheduled time only, with all time removed. With-in Citrix Management Console right click on the misbehaving Citrix Server and choose “Load Manage Server” and choose the “Off-Line” Evaluator. This will effectively set the server to an offline state when you assign a server to it, until you are ready to assign it back to your normal load evaluator.

Here's the good part about using the Off-Line Load Evaluator technique. Keep reading.

The best way to explain this part is for you to see it for yourself. Go to the Citrix Management Console, click on Load Evaluator, and on the right there are 3 tabs, click on usage reports, and at the bottom choose “By Evaluator”, this will list all servers by evaluator. You can now view how many servers are in the Off-Line Evaluator centrally.

If you are managing a moderately large Citrix Farm of say 80 to 100 servers, and 140 applications, then method #3 will allow you to easily move servers to an Off-Line state and back on without having to remove published applications from them, while giving you the ability to centrally view which servers have been set off-line by other support staff members.

Written by Scott Chiara 3-24-2004

Off-Line Evaluator Technique by Ken Smith.