Book Image

Optimizing Citrix?? XenDesktop?? for High Performance

By : Craig Thomas Ellrod
Book Image

Optimizing Citrix?? XenDesktop?? for High Performance

By: Craig Thomas Ellrod

Overview of this book

Citrix XenDesktop is a suite of desktop virtualization tools designed to provide users with fast and convenient access to their Windows desktops and applications through any device. Virtual desktops mean that rather than setting up hundreds or thousands of individual computers in an enterprise, companies can instead opt to create servers with large amounts of memory, disk, and processing resources, and use virtualization to offer these resources to end users. The result of this is that users are provided with an experience that appears to be identical to having an individual desktop PC. Each user has some disk space, processor time, and memory allocated to them, as though it is present on their own physical machine, when in reality, the resources are physically present on a centralized server. This book starts by answering the basic questions you need to ask when considering XenDesktop, followed by methods of how you can properly size your server infrastructure for XenDesktop. You’ll discover how to optimize the virtual machines used in XenDesktop, how to optimize your network for XenDesktop, and how to optimize the hypervisor and the cloud. You’ll also learn how to monitor XenDesktop to maximize performance. By the end of the book, you will be able to plan, design, build, and deploy high performance XenDesktop Virtualization systems in enterprises. You will also know how to monitor and maintain your systems to ensure smooth operation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Optimizing Citrix XenDesktop for High Performance
Notice
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

XenServer® vCPU tweaks


The following tweaks help you tune performance with regards to CPUs in XenServer.

Disable power management

We discussed this in the VMware section and it applies to any hypervisor, including XenServer. Power management options enabled through the BIOS reduce the clock speed on the CPUs. Go into the BIOS and either disable power management or set it to the highest setting for maximum performance. Don't hinder the CPU's you invested all that money in.

Caps, pins, and weights

You can pin VMs to CPUs, give VMs higher weighted priorities for CPU time and cap VMs usage on CPUs. Leave the default settings and let the XenServer hypervisor do the work.

CPU tools

There are some command line tools you can use to check the CPU usage on your XenServer hosts. The tool host-cpu-tune can be found in the /usr/lib/xen/bin/ directory. Other CPU tools include xenpm get-cpu-topology and xl vcpu-list.

irqbalance

One of the CPU hogs can be the processing of interrupts and interrupts queues. The...