How To: Configure a Backup VServer

In this AskSupport How To video you will learn how to Configure a Backup VServer

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Transcript : Hi. My name is Ronan O’Brien, and I work for the Citrix Tech Support Readiness Team. In today’s How To I’m going to talk about creating a backup virtual server. The function of a backup virtual server is that we can give our customers and our end users a consistent experience when our servers go down. So, the idea behind it, is that you could redirect all the requests to your Vserver, the one which is down, send them to another particular web server, which is just there serving, perhaps, just one page saying, “Sorry, system is down. Please call back.” Or it could be a separate system completely, which takes over, depending on how you want to configure it. But the whole idea is that your end users don’t get a Page Cannot be Displayed error. So the server I’m going to use, my trusty green web page server. So we can see that it’s loaded fine there. And then what we’re going to do is, this is using this service here, which is using a Http monitor probe. This monitor is basically sending a request to the backend web server, and it’s searching for a 200 response code in the response. Now the first step I need to take is to create my backup virtual server, Backup-Service. Okay. Now I could create a server, I could create the server and give it the IP or…in the server node here, or I can just do it on the fly. So, to keep this short, I’ll just do it on the fly, give it an IP, and throw across a HTTP monitor on there. I click Create, and there we see my backend web…my backup server is running. Now we get to the interesting part. We create the backup virtual server. Now we have a choice here. If you’re low on IP addresses, it’s possible to deselect this Directly Addressable field here. We get a warning. This means that we can’t connect to the Vserver directly. It just exists as an entity which will receive requests from the downed Vserver. Okay. This forwards them on automatically. If you do want to, you know, make this available or to be able to check if this is up or not, you can do so by giving it an IP address. So I’m just going to choose, take this off for the moment, okay, just to show that we can have a Vserver that’s not…that doesn’t have an IP address. I’m going to call it BackupVserver. Bind my backup service to it. It’s important we don’t forget to do this last step, otherwise the Vserver will be down. And if you’re backup Vserver is down, then you’re in trouble. So I click Create. And there we see our backup virtual server. Note the IP address is zero and the port is zero. Okay, it’s not listening. It’s just simply an entity which will pass the requests on to the backend service from here. So I go to my green Vserver. I go to Advanced. And here I choose a backup Vserver. Right? And that’s all we do. That’s it configured. So let’s test it out. Okay, what I’m going to do now, is I’m going to bring this service down. Okay? So let’s disable it. I can set a time period in here. If I want to drain connections, I can do so. I’ll just set it to zero for the moment; we don’t have time to drain that. So it’s now out of service. I go to my virtual servers. I hit Refresh here. We can see that it’s down. Okay? But my backup virtual server is up. So what happens now when I go to the…my Vserver IP address? I get a different page. This is the backup virtual server, which is my red server. Has the IP changed? No. It’s the very same IP address. If this page wasn’t red, if it was the same color, the content was the same, your end users would have no idea that they’re actually…have been transferred to your backup system. So that’s how to create a backup virtual server. Simple. It’s very useful. It can be a very useful concept in terms of load balancing web interface, for example, in Citrix XenApp. So, if you want to configure that here, you could configure your web interface servers here that backup and use the IP address, your load balance VIP, for your web interface server in your Access Gateway configuration. So, hopefully, that’s useful to some of you out there. Thanks very much for watching, and have a nice day.

anonymous - I am not able to view the configure a vserver backup video

davidmcg - Video works perfect for me, can you try again please. Thanks David