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

Hyper-V storage tweaks


Hyper-V runs on top of the Windows server operating system and, as a default install, you can imagine that it might just not be optimized for virtualization. The following are some tweaks you can use to improve the storage performance in Hyper-V.

SMB Direct

SMB Direct is a new feature in Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 that supports adapters that have Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capability. Network adapters with RDMA can function at full speed with very low latency using very little CPU. It allows remote storage to resemble local storage with the advantage of increased throughput, low latency, and low CPU utilization.

Storage drivers

Hyper-V runs on top of the Windows server. Therefore, if you've installed any iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage, make sure you have the latest high performance drivers installed before you install VMs

Unnecessary protocols

Disable unused protocols on the Hyper-V server network interface cards, such as IPv6, Discovery Mapper and Responder...