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

Storage virtualization


There are a lot of moving parts in storage virtualization. Storage systems either provide block or file storage. Block storage typically uses iSCSI or FCoE while file storage typically uses NFS or CIFS/SMB. As virtualization abstracts the underlying hardware, so too does storage virtualization abstract the physical storage resources. Virtualization attempts to present the virtual machine with storage resources and then does the emulation or mapping to the actual physical storage location. The mapping of virtual to physical storage is maintained in a mapping table called meta-data.

The hypervisor uses the meta-data to map I/O requests from the logical location on the virtual disk into I/O requests on the physical disk. Storage virtualization allows logical storage representations to be aggregated into storage pools. This allows storage resources to scale up significantly and be transparent to the virtual machine using the storage. Logical disks or virtual disks are made...