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® Tools


XenServer Tools provide high performance Windows drivers and a management agent that enhances performance between the XenDesktop. The paravirtualization drivers in XenServer enable Windows running in the user space DomU to access the resources in the hypervisor kernel space, or Dom0.

Initially, Citrix systems produced paravirtualized drivers for Windows as part of their commercial XenServer virtualization suite. Now, these drivers are available as a standard distribution with the XenServer hypervisor, as a result of Citrix recently submitting the XenServer project to the Apache Open Source Foundation. Advanced features of XenServer and XenCenter require purchase of the commercial version from Citrix.

You could conceptually run Windows virtual machines in open source Xen. Before Citrix submitted the XenServer product back into the open source community through the Apache foundation, it lacked PV drivers for Windows, and performance would therefore suffer greatly. Today, the...