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

VMware virtual storage


VMware supports both file and block storage. Through vSphere, which includes the ESXi hypervisor, VMware provides features and APIs which offer an abstraction layer for physical storage resources to be addressed, managed, and optimized in a virtual environment.

Datastores

VMware vSphere allows you to create logical containers called datastores. Virtual machine operating systems and their data are stored in these containers. Datastores can also be used for storing .iso images, templates and other files.

Virtual machine filesystem

VMware has its own storage system format known as the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS). VMFS can be deployed on a SCSI-based local or networked storage device such as a SAN device. NFS is a filesystem from the *nix world and can be deployed on a NAS device.

VMFS allows multiple vSphere servers to access shared virtual machine storage concurrently and enables virtualization-based distributed architectures to operate across a cluster of vSphere...