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How to build a Citrix infrastructure on AWS
1. How to build a Citrix
infrastructure in the Amazon
cloud (AWS)
Denis Gundarev, Senior Consultant, Entisys Solutions
May 8, 2014
2. Tweet about this session with
hashtag #SYN514,
#CitrixSynergy and
#GeekSpeak
All links available at
http://bit.ly/CitrixOnAWS
3. About me
Windows PowerShell
Copyright (C) 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
PS C:UsersDenis> [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()
AuthenticationType : LiveSSP
IsAuthenticated : True
IsGeek : True
IsSystem : False
IsAnonymous : False
Name : ENTISYSDenis
User : S-1-5-21-1126498620-3681631189-227381393-500
Groups : {Bay Area Citrix User Group, Citrix Technology Professional, ...}
Email : DenisG@entisys.com
Twitter : @fdwl
11. EC2 Instance = Virtual Machine
Amazon Machine Image (AMI) = VM Template or Snapshot may be shared or private
Two types of storage available:
Elastic Block Store (EBS) Volume = Virtual Disk, support provisioned IOPS, could be snapshotted,
SAN-based
Instance Store = Local Host storage, SSD option
EBS vs IS? - http://bit.ly/EBSvsIS
EBS Story - http://bit.ly/EBSStory
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Basics
Amazon EC2 Amazon EBS
12. Availability Zone = Amazon Datacenter (http://bit.ly/AWSDataCenters)
VM Import/Export = Import VMWare vmdk, XenServer/Hyper-V VHD
(http://bit.ly/VMImport)
Instances may run on dedicated hardware
EC2 Compute Unit = equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon
processor (http://bit.ly/EC2ComputeUnits)
Instance could retrieve the metadata (http://bit.ly/EC2Metadata)
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Basics
Amazon EC2 Amazon EBS
15. VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) = Logically Isolated
Network
Subnet = VLAN
Security Group = Set of Stateful Firewall Rules
Elastic IP address (EIP) = Static “reusable”
public IP address
Amazon Networking
16. Elastic network interface (ENI) = “reusable”
NIC with assigned internal IP addresses, EIP,
MAC and Security Group mapping
NAT is used for public IP mapping
Dedicated NAT instances
Network ACL = *stateless* firewall between
subnets
Virtual private gateway (VPG) = Amazon
side of VPN connection
Amazon Direct Connect
Amazon Networking
17. CloudWatch
Basic Monitoring – CPU, Disk, Network at
five-minute frequency – Free
Detailed Monitoring - Basic + Status Check
at one-minute frequency – for an additional
charge
EBS Volumes – Read/Write Bytes, IOPS,
Queue, Throughput and Consumed IOPS -
Free
Custom Metrics - i.e. any perfmon metric,
submitted by a scheduled script
Alarms
Graphs/Statistics
Auto Scaling
19. mon-put-metrics-mem.ps1 —Collects system metrics on an Amazon EC2 Windows
instance (memory, page file utilization) and sends them to Amazon CloudWatch.
mon-put-metrics-disk.ps1 —Collects system metrics on an Amazon EC2 instance (disk
space utilization) and sends them to Amazon CloudWatch.
mon-put-metrics-perfmon.ps1 —Collects PerfMon counters on an Amazon EC2 instance
and sends them to Amazon CloudWatch.
mon-get-instance-stats.ps1—Queries Amazon CloudWatch and displays the most recent
utilization statistics for the EC2 instance on which this script is executed.
http://bit.ly/CWPowerShell
CloudWatch Monitoring Scripts
22. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) = Preconfigured VM with Microsoft SQL or
MySQL managed by Amazon
Amazon Route 53 = DNS Hosting
Identity and Account Management
Other AWS Services
30. • Who are the users and what are our requirementsUser Layer
• How do users gain access to our resourcesAccess Layer
• What resources will we deliverResource Layer
• How will we manage and maintain the solutionControl Layer
• What do I need to make this happenHardware Layer
Citrix’s 5-layer model
36. Product Documentation - http://bit.ly/NSonAWS
Netscaler High Availability Failover does not Occur in AWS Environment
http://bit.ly/NSonAWSHA
Deployment practices and guidelines for NetScaler on Amazon Web Services
http://bit.ly/NSonAWSGuide
Don’t be confused, there is CloudBridge VPX (NetScaler) and Citrix Branch Repeater for
CloudBridge (WanScaler)
NetScaler on AWS
38. Citrix on AWS
Limitations
No Capacity management in XA/XD 7.x
No Client OS
No Windows Server 2012 R2
No L2, IPV6 on NetScaler
Slow HA on NetScaler
No PVS support
Guidelines
Use XA6.5 with PCM and EC2 Auto
Scaling for dynamic workloads
Use Amazon VPN for site-to-site
connections
Start with basic config
Size instances properly
Be careful with VPC planning and
Security Groups
39. Email me – denisg@entisys.com
Connect with me – http://j.mp/gundarev
Get all reference materials - http://bit.ly/CitrixOnAWS
Join BayCUG http://baycug.meetup.com