Archy.net Blog

Citrix Edgesight architecture scenario – part 2/2

If you need to build an EdgeSight architecture for more than 6000 agents, you need to know you will have to split your database and EdgeSight server (web server) associated with it. This next architecture doesn’t include Edgesight database broker you will need for XenDesktop VDI deployment. If some of you are looking forward a VDI deployment for EdgeSight just let me know, Twitter, Facebook, email, comment or phone, I can make it simple for you, and you won’t need to read the 300 documentation pages ! This is a slightly different approach with file share and database broker…

A typical data upload size for an EdgeSight for Endpoints agent is 80KB. EdgeSight for XenApp agent data uploads are typically larger due to the greater amount of data collected and can reach 300KB. These data upload sizes depend on a number of factors such as the agent properties and the usage profile of the system hosting the agent.

From Edgesight Admin guide page 22.

Of course it depend how your worker are configured and what data you need to collect. I’m still trying to figure our how to calculate the amount of data transferred from agents to the web server, this is a complex calculation and it take a lot of time for something Citrix should provide.

So architecture for large environment is the same as the one you could watch in the previous blog – Citrix Edgesight architecture scenario – part 1/2 – except you need to split database and EdgeSight server. Only one Citrix license server and you can also keep one SQL Reporting Services for both Edgesight servers.

This configuration means you need to configure agents with a different http address, for example, at one customer I had 4000 XenApp servers and 5000 Endpoint agents, so I choose to split Endpoint agents on one Edgesight server and all XenApp on the other. This is not very handy when you want to check from XenApp servers to the endpoint statistics, but this is the way it is for now.  By multiplying EdgeSight environment, complexity is getting stronger and find the good information is sometimes a matter of hours instead of minutes...

What Citrix should consider for the future of Edgesight :

• Stop to check Citrix licenses on the Edgesight Servers, only agents is enough I think, then we would be able to load balance Edgesight Servers and SQL Reporting Services servers, spliting wouldn’t be necessary.
• Since we don’t have Resource manager anymore, consider to bring at least the same level of information in EdgeSight we had with RM with the Advanced license.
• Make available a complete EdgeSight database diagram.
• Provide a simple tool to build 1,2,3 custom report.
• Correct these annoying bug : When a Desktop is publish, no statistics are recorded, this is the same for an application with an argument in the command line…

Useful Links :
EdgeSight Wikipedia
EdgeSight Forums

EdgeSight Under The Hood