Load Balancing for Citrix MetaFrame Presentation

Administrator’s Guide - Load Manager for MetaFrame XP with Feature Release 3

What is Load Manager?

Load Manager is a feature of Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server and is automatically installed with MetaFrame Presentation Server XPa or XPe.

Load Manager provides application load balancing across Servers in your Citrix Farm.

Simple example: You publish an application in the Citrix Farm, Say notepad.exe, you then asign this application to several servers. When clients connect to this application the sessions are evenly distributed across the servers you asigned to this application.

Advanced example: You publish your flagship application in the Farm and asign it to 10 servers. Since everyone starts work at 8am they all attempt to launch the flagship application almost at the same time. The default load evaluator will evenly distribute the sessions across all 10 servers as users logon.


Best Practice Tip: To avoid overloading a server that you just added to the flagship application, you create a custom Load Evaluator. This custom load evaluator should be set to suite your individual envorinment, however, here are some settings that work very well in a large busy Farm.

CPU at 60% maximum
Memory at 70% maximum
Sessions at 70.



When you need to set a server to an Off-Line state, without affecting current sessions. Here is a great technique to accomplish this using a custom Load Evaluator.

The Off-Line Load Evaluator