Question about fundamental technologies in Citrix

QHalo

I'm reading through the installation guide for XA5 on W2K8. They discuss that separating infrastructure servers out in large deployments is typical. My question is as I understand it, to have services like Citrix XML would require that you have a Citrix server with XA installed and nothing else and all it's doing it brokering connections from the WI to the farm and it has nothing else, typically, installed on it. Sounds like a waste of an expensive license to me. Also, how would you go about making that redundant?

If you have two servers providing the XML service for the farm, would you have those two servers as part of a separate farm? I would assume so but I'm confused. I think the Citrix XML Service is one of the most confusing concepts to visualize. I understand how they work, just not how you would implement them in the above situations.

stupidboy

LOL, I've read this a number of times recently most recently in XenDesktop documentation.

The idea is great and I am sure you can appreciate how this works and why its a good thing. As you point out it does seems a waste, however, dedicated zone data collectors are just the same and I do not see any reason why the two functions could not sit on the same host. Obviously if you are talking about less than 10 servers then dedicating on for XML or even ZDC is a little over kill IMO.

As for redundancy, you would specify another server (or servers) in the Web Interface configuration as fail over rather than load balancing.

I hope this makes sense, if not please say