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

Paravirtualization


Paravirtualization (PV) is a technique used in virtualization that presents a software interface to virtual machines that represents the underlying hardware. Essentially, it means that virtual machines will see and use the underlying hardware just as they normally would if they were running as a single operating system on a physical server. The virtual machine has been modified or enhanced to work with the hypervisor through an API, for example. This is where XenTools and VMware Tools come into play, and we will talk about that more later.

Note

In paravirtualization, the virtual machine and the hypervisor know about each other and work together. Paravirtualization is optimized and fast.

PV abstracts the underlying hardware into software-based hardware constructs. Paravirtualization was first introduced by the Xen hypervisor team. The first time I came across the concept of paravirtualization was when I was working on marrying the first open source router (Vyatta) with the...