Typical interactions between a server farm, a server running the Web Interface, and a user device are described below.
The figure shows an example of a typical Web Interface interaction. The Web browser on the user’s device sends information to the Web server, which communicates with the server farm to provide the user with access to the resources.
- A user authenticates to the Web Interface through a Web browser.
- The Web server reads the user’s credentials and forwards the information to the Citrix XML Service on servers in the server farms. The designated server acts as a broker between the Web server and the other servers in the farm.
- The Citrix XML Service on the designated server retrieves from the servers a list of resources that the user can access. These resources comprise the user’s resource set. The Citrix XML Service retrieves the resource set from the Independent Management Architecture (IMA) system.
- The Citrix XML Service then returns the user’s resource set information to the Web Interface running on the server.
- The user clicks an icon that represents a resource on the HTML page.
- The Citrix XML Service is contacted to locate the server in the farm that is least busy. The Citrix XML Service identifies the least busy server and returns the address of this server to the Web Interface.
- The Web Interface communicates with the Citrix client (in some cases using the Web browser as an intermediary).
- The Citrix client initiates a session with the server in the farm according to the connection information supplied by the Web Interface