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® virtual storage


XenServer supports both local storage in the form of SATA, SAS, and SSD. It also supports networked storage in the form of SAN and NAS. XenServer uses NFSv3 over TCP for remote file storage on NAS and iSCSI and Fibre Channel for block storage on SAN. Through XenCenter, which uses the XenAPI (xapi), XenServer provides an abstraction layer for physical storage resources to be addressed, managed, and optimized in a virtual environment.

Tip

NFSv4 and NFX over UDP are not supported on XenServer

Repositories

Storage is organized as storage repositories in XenServer; these contain virtual disk images, physical block devices, and virtual block devices. In XenServer, a storage respository is an abstraction of the physical disk device, which can be either locally attached or on a SAN. Virtual disk images are created as a storage abstraction that can be presented to virtual machines for storage. The virtual machine sees this as a virtual disk. A XenServer storage respository...