Keeping Citrix Servers Consistent
The Company
A financial services company using a 40-server Citrix farm to support its business operations. The objective is to ensure that all the servers match their specified build and stay that way.
The Problem
In order for this Citrix farm to run effectively, each of the servers needs to match the standard build. System users began to experience degraded performance and notice high latency in many of their time-sensitive transactions. Requests for IT support rose dramatically. The IT department then identified that many of the servers had drifted, no longer matching the specified standard build.
The Solution
The company decided to use Enterprise Trust Server™ (ETS) to improve their control over the Citrix server farm. The first step was capturing the standard Citrix server build to be used as a reference. SignaCert tools were used to quickly capture file names, paths, and cryptographic hashes for each file that is part of the standard build. These values were then published to the ETS appliance to be used as the reference for the production Citrix Servers.
to be used as a reference.
Next the SignaCert client was deployed to each server in the farm. The client is a lightweight non-persistent application that scans the files on disk, computes a cryptographic hash for each found file, and creates and sends an XML document to the ETS appliance for comparison with the reference for that device. The customer scheduled the client to run three times daily to identify any differences between the servers and the standard Citrix build. The results show if any files were added or removed to the specific server or if any of the files have been modified. These differences are used by the customer to drive their internal remediation processes and keep the entire farm identical.
deviations from the standard Citrix build.
Results
Through the use of verification processes, the company has dramatically improved thier control over the Citrix farm.
- Reduced IT support requests—They have reduced the number of support calls regarding processes running on the Citrix server farm.
- Improved performance—They have noticeably improved performance of these processes through keeping the overall system in control.
- Faster diagnoses—They spend less time diagnosing problems that do occur in this system because they have a record of what it should look like and can accurately verify what is actually present.