I was recently tasked with migrating XenDesktop and PVS databases from Microsoft SQL server 2008 Enterprise edition to MS SQL 2016 standard edition. Since I had to document the entire process for operations team, I thought I should share it with everyone. Citrix Database Migration process starts with doing some […]
Category: Citrix Database
A Virtual Apps or Citrix Virtual Desktops site uses three SQL Server Citrix database:
- Site: (also known as site configuration) stores the running site configuration, plus the current session state and connection information.
- Configuration logging: (also known as logging) stores information about site configuration changes and administrative activities. This database is used when the configuring logging feature is enabled (default = enabled).
- Monitoring: stores data used by Director, such as session and connection information.
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Brokers use the database as a message bus for broker communications, storing configuration, monitoring, and auditing data. The databases are constantly in use and can consume significant compute resources on the SQL server.
For example, resource enumeration (resources identified and presented to the user), resource launch, and session start up stages require the Citrix Delivery Controller to interact with the SQL server.
To ensure that a SQL server outage has a minimal impact to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops infrastructure, customers can choose from the following High Availability options that are supported by Citrix:
- AlwaysOn Availability Groups
- AlwaysOn Failover Clustering
- Basic Availability Groups
- Hypervisor HA*
Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM) supports Always On availability groups (Basic and Advanced) for Citrix database high availability based on Microsoft SQL Server. Citrix has tested this using Microsoft SQL Server 2017.
Always On availability groups allow databases to automatically fail over if the hardware or software of a principal or primary SQL Server fails, which ensures that Workspace Environment Management continues to work as expected. The Always On availability groups feature requires that the SQL Server instances reside on the Windows Server failover Cluster (WSFC) nodes.
Citrix Database Recovery Model
Full, Simple and Bulk-logged are the recovery models that can be assigned to a database. Choosing a Database Recovery Model for Citrix Databases seems straightforward if we go by Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops product documentation i.e. Full should be the Citrix Database Recovery Model if you are using Mirroring. […]