Citrix Edgesight architecture scenario – part 1/2

During past years, I had to design and deploy several kind of Citrix Edgesight architectures, from the “POC” design to “Large deployment”. I had to consider what was the best way to use this product and handle the number of devices to monitor. One type of architecture I didn’t needed to use yet is with Citrix XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Monitoring and Edgesight Agent Database Server.

Since Ressource Manager (RIP) disappear with Citrix XenApp 6, Edgesight became a mandatory tool to have the big picture of your XenApp farms health. It’s of course a lot more than that with Platinum licenses, this will be the subject for another blog. This blog focuses on Citrix Edgesight 5.3.

Important notes regarding supported database :

SQL Server 2008 (Standard or better) or SQL Server 2005 SP2 or later (Standard or better). Note that SQL Server 2008 R2 is not supported,
Important: Note the following configuration requirements:
In SQL Server 2008, the Reporting Services Role called Manage Shared Schedules no longer exists as a stand-alone role; it is now part of the System Administrator Role. For more information, see Configuring Reporting Services for Citrix EdgeSight.
SQL Server must be configured for case-insensitive collation. Case-sensitive collation is not currently supported for this release.
SQL Server should be configured to use Windows Authentication or Mixed-Mode Authentication.
Reporting Services is included with SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005. Reporting Services can be installed on a separate machine from the data source.
SQL Agent Service running and set to start automatically (if Reporting Services is installed on the machine)

First when you need to practice and want to check out what is Citrix Edgesight, you can easily setup a VM with Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 x64, install SQL 2008 and its SP1 with Reporting Services. Then you can configure Internet Information Services (IIS) to host Edgesight’s website and install the Citrix License Server as well on the same machine. Keep in mind this is for Proof Of Concept only and shouldn’t be used in Production environment.

Before going further you need to estimate the Edgesight SQL Database size regarding the number of agent deployed. Couple of year ago I had to request the mathematics law to Citrix support to know about that; now there is a tool (more…)