AnywhereUSB 14 with Citrix XenApp

I have a Citrix XenApp environment in which I’m using provisioning services. We have a few application that have the need for a USB device so we have purchased the 14 port AnywhereUSB. Reading through the documenation I’m having trouble figuring out how this is going to work with Xenapp and provisioning services.

Provisioning services uses a “gold” image and the individual XenApp servers boot from that image. This makes it so that all XenApp server are identical in configuration. My confusion here is that when I configure the image I will point it to a group number then all XenApp servers are going to try to connect to the same group number. What is going to happen when this is attempted? Does anyone know of a way to make this work?

This is in general

Multiple host PCs can “take turns” connecting to the AnywhereUSB, however they cannot be connected to the AnywhereUSB simultaneously.

The AnywhereUSB/14 (P/N AW-USB-14) and the AnywhereUSB/5M (P/N AW-USB-5M-W) are currently the only models that offers the Multi-Host Connections (MHC) feature, which allows multiple host PCs to connect to the AnywhereUSB/14 or AnywhereUSB/5M at the same time. With those models in particular, each host PC may be connected to one or more USB ports. Note, however, that multiple host PCs cannot “share” any of the same USB ports / USB devices.

You can create groups and connect to the different host machines.

If 10 pc’s are connected to 10 different ports then, they can access their 10 different AUSB ports at the same time.
For example, let’s say we have PC 1 to PC 10. PC1 connects to AUSB port 1, PC 2 connects to AUSB port2, PC3 connects to AUSB port3 and so on…
All the PCs can access their AUSB ports at the same time. But PC1 and PC2 cannot connect to AUSB port 1 at the same time

In general only one computer can connect to one USB port and/or multiple USB ports but, multiple computers cannot share a single USB port in AnywhereUSB.

In your case, you can connect Multiple host to AUSB by creating a groups, say you have created group 1 for primary server and connected to group1 and other ports are assigned to other groups. once the Primary server goes down the secondary server can be able to connect to AUSB like before but cannot connect to group1 as it is still connected to primary server, you need to disconnect first and then can be able to access the group.