The following Article is an update of the Official KB Health Checking Citrix Services with Advanced Monitors from the NetScaler Application Switch.

In this KB, Citrix Consulting explains how to use the Citrix Netscaler to Load Balance and HealthCheck a XenApp Environment.

However, the Official article is based on the Netscaler 6.1 kernel, and now all appliances are shipped with the 8.X so you could easily understand that some updates are needed.

Note : On lastest Netscaler releases, specific monitors for Web Interface and Citrix XML Service have been embedded. If you want to use them, then you don't need the perl scripts and kas support, plus you won't need an anonymous published Application. However, using custom scripts allows You further logging and debug regarding XML requests.

Description

The main goal of using such an architecture is to have an intelligent load balancing of the Web Interface and XML Broker Servers.

Actually, besides the basic load balancing feature, the Netscaler can use advanced monitors to ensure that the services on the backend servers are fully healthy.

You'll find below a synoptic describing the Netscaler Configuration :

 Below is a synoptic describing the Netscaler location in the Target Environment :