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

Application Delivery Controllers


An ADC is an appliance in a datacenter that sits in front of servers to offload the heavy lifting of performance-related tasks. I talk about ADCs in my companion book, Getting Started with XenDesktop® 7.x, Packt Publishing. If you refer back to Chapter 1, XenDesktop® Architecture, in this book, and look at the network diagram, you can see Citrix NetScaler as the frontend to the XenDesktop site.

There are many vendors that supply ADC besides providing SSL to your clients. ADCs are generally a good piece of equipment when it comes to load balancing, caching, compression, and high availability.

Load balancer

A load balancer is a device that acts as a reverse proxy and distributes network and application traffic across a number of servers. A side benefit is that they provide high availability, because, if a server goes down or malfunctions, the load balancer elegantly load balances around it so that no user ever has to encounter a service interruption. The main...