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® domains


XenServer, which is built on open source Xen, takes a slightly different approach. Recognizing the need for different layers that need different privileges for accessing the underlying resources, XenServer uses the concept of Dom0 and DomU, and with the release of XenServer v6.5, Dom0 is now a 64-bit architecture. The following is a detailed description of them:

  • Dom0 stands for Domain 0 and is the privileged space that provides access to disks, networks, memory, and CPUs. Dom0 contains all the necessary drivers to provide access to the virtual machines. Dom0 is similar to kernel space.

  • Virtual machines and applications run in DomU, which stands for Domain User or User Domain. Providing access to the underlying hardware in Xen is done through backend drivers in Dom0 that communicate with frontend drivers in DomU. DomU is where your virtual machines run. In terms of server architectures, DomU is analogous to user space. You can have multiple DomUs running on top of Dom0: