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

Personal vDisk


Machine Creation Services (MCS) is a XenDesktop deployment technology that allows you to create a single, golden image to be used as a virtual desktop by all of the users. Personal Virtual Disk (PvD) is a feature of XenDesktop that allows you to expand on that by providing an extra user-specific data-disk where the user can store their unique data including profiles and applications. What this means is, MCS with PvD allows you to use a single operating system image for a number of virtual machines, instead of creating a separate disk for each virtual machine while providing a mechanism for individual user preferences and customizations to the base image that will occur. PvD keeps track of these for each user on a P: drive and in the UserData.vhd file. The delta between the base image that is shared, and the user customizations that are stored, is large enough that it ends up saving you a lot of space and money on storage.