Citrix load evaluators

[cookie_monster]

I'm trying to more evenly balance load accross our citrix farm, we have 5 boxes 2 are physical with a quad core processor, 3 are VM's on a dual quad core box with 2 vCPU's each. The two physical units can handle more load than the VM's so i'd like them to handle more sessions.

 

I had a read about the 'Advanced' load evaluator and saw that the 90% CPU metric can be a bit high so I created a custom load balancer which is a copy of the citrix 'Advanced' load balancer but with the CPU metric set to 70%.

 

Next lesson I get a call saying that everything is running very slow, when I take a look it seems that the lowest spec servers are handling most sessions . Am I missing a key part of the process here?

 

Thanks.

 

EDIT

 

On further inspection it seems that the first two most powerful boxes 1 & 2 take a most sessions (as planned) then 3 & 4 take a smaller amount but then 5 which is the same spec as 3 and 4 ends up with loads.

Edited February 24, 2010 by cookie_monster

[Ric_]

Have you definitely assigned the load evaluators to all the servers?

 

In Delivery Services Console, right-click your application, click all tasks and select load manage application to double check. Also check on the servers themselves by right-clicking the server names and selecting assign load evaluator (I think that this is bypassed if you publish as an application though).

[cookie_monster]

Currently we're only publishing server desktops i've not got any load balancing assigned to them it's set on the servers. If I look in the PS console under the 'Usage reports' tab it shows as applied to all servers.

 

Should I load manage the applications as well?

 

I'm getting odd results what ever I try I think this could be allot of trial and error.