PVS Database on Storefront server?

[sortola27]

Is there any reason why the PVS Database shouldn't be installed on the PVS server itself or on a storefront server using SQL Express?   

Citrix documentation mentions for load balancing reasons you should separate PVS and the database but what if we only have 1 PVS server in the farm.

Has anyone done this?  We're trying to see if we can avoid spinning up another server just for this one database at a secondary datacenter.

[Simon Graham]

The expectation is that you will have multiple PVS servers to provide availability and scale and putting the database on one of those means the other(s) cannot operate when the one is down.

 

If you have a single PVS server (not recommended for production) or you are just testing then yes you can put SQL Express on that server to be the database - just dont expect the target VMs to be highly available!

 

Simon

[sortola27]

Understood.   Say we go with multiple PVS servers, what about putting the PVS database on the storefront server?  Putting HA aside, is there any potential issues for resource usage with the PVS database and Storefront on the same server?

Thanks,

[Jeff Riechers]

If you are a smaller environment I wouldn't even go PVS, I would go MCS if using virtual machines.  I really only use PVS at this point if I am replicating the image to multiple datacenters.

 

Then you are reducing your database numbers down 1.

 

For smallish environments I will often put the SQLExpress DB on the license server, and make sure that is highly available.  Then for WEM, DDC, PVS I will set them up to  have DB down resiliency to carry over any small shutdowns or reboots on the DB.

[sortola27]

Here's a bigger look at our scenario:

We're currently in the process of building out our migration to Citrix Cloud.  Our existing setup has 2 PVS servers, 2 storefront at our primary datacenter and 1 PVS at our secondary datacenter , both PVS sites are the same farm.  Secondary datacenter at this time is only used for DR situations.  The existing farm database is on a SQL server at our primary datacenter . If our primary datacenter goes down, everything is pretty much offline until we swing our servers/routing over to run off the Secondary datacenter .

In building our Citrix Cloud environment, we're looking at the idea of 2 almost independent datacenters.   Currently we have 2 resource locations setup with 2 connectors, 2 PVS and 1 storefront server and would have 200 VDI (plus some xen servers) in each datacenter.  We're trying to figure out the best approach for the PVS database though, such as using 2 farms so each datacenter's PVS database is independent. If 1 datacenter goes down, the other is still fully functionally.

We're just trying to see if we can safely utilize an existing server at our secondary datacenter, such as the Storefront or cloud connector, to host the PVS database so we're not spinning up another SQL server for what is currently a 230MB database.

Hope that gives a better picture of what we're thinking about.

Thanks yall.