Book Image

Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials

By : Luca Dentella
Book Image

Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials

By: Luca Dentella

Overview of this book

Citrix XenApp is an application virtualization product that allows users to connect to their corporate applications from any device. XenApp can host applications on central servers and allows users to interact with them remotely or stream and deliver them to user devices for local execution. Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials is a practical guide that provides you guidelines, best practices, and real world examples that will help you to improve the performance of your farm, identifying and solving possible bottlenecks and using advanced features including the new features provided by XenApp 6.5. Citrix XenApp is widely used to deliver enterprise applications to end users. This book covers the whole process of optimizing a XenApp farm, starting from the design phase all the way to tuning for remote users and connecting via geographic links. With your farm in production, you will understand what to monitor and how to optimize your farm, as well as how to use an open-source tool, WANem, to test the applications' behavior with different link conditions. You will also learn which settings and features XenApp offers to optimize CPU and memory utilization. This book will help you to prevent or solve performance problems and make your users happy working with published applications.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Emulating links with WANem


If you're planning to publish applications on geographic links, it's very important to test how those applications perform and you'll learn later in this chapter, how the optimizations work for improving the user experience.

Plan a complete UAT (User Acceptance Test) phase before going to production, if possible with real users. In this paragraph you'll learn how to use an opensource tool, WANem, to emulate a WAN link.

I usually prepare some test scenarios, and ask users to give a score from 1 (bad) to 5 (good) for the user experience. Here's an example of the feedbacks I got from a test session, varying bandwidth (columns) and latency (rows) and without any optimizations:

Time

100 Kb/s

200 Kb/s

300 Kb/s

500 Kb/s

10 ms

2

3

4

5

50 ms

2

2

3

4

150 ms

1

1

1

2

Installing

WANem is distributed as a bootable CD, based on Linux Knoppix. The operating system runs live from the CD, that is, you don't need to install it on the machine's hard disk.

WANem does...