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

Memory


As you can guess, with virtualization and the concept of collapsing multiple virtual machines into one physical server, there will be resource contention. The first issue that comes to mind is how all these virtual machines will share the memory resources in the server. If they can't, then there really is no point to virtualization.

The concept of sharing memory is critical to virtualization. Sharing memory happens natively in virtualization through different techniques that the 3qdh hypervisor implements, and we will discuss those. Sharing memory resources is different than overcommitting, in that it refers to the sharing of available memory.

The concept of overcommitting physical memory allows allocation of memory to virtual machines that exceeds the capacity of the physical memory in the system. Memory overcommitment assumes that some of the virtual machines will not be maximizing their use of allocated memory. This means that excess physical memory will be available for the hypervisor...