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 virtual CPUs


CPU resources are handled differently in Hyper-V than they are VMware ESXi and XenServer. In VMware and XenServer, if a vCPU slows down, all the other vCPUs will have to slow down, because they are all scheduled or time-sliced together. Microsoft addresses the scheduling problem inside of the guest or virtual machine. As the virtual machine is aware that it is running in a guest within a hypervisor, the operating system knows to schedule processes independently as opposed to combining with vCPU scheduling. Hyper-V understands CPU calls will be coming independently. Oversubscription is not as big of a deal as this method has much less overhead.

A vCPU in Hyper-V is simply a time slice of the physical CPU resource. You can overcommit vCPU resources in Hyper-V as would be expected in any hypervisor. Independent vCPU management is handled automatically by Hyper-V. You can reserve vCPU processing time, assign vCPU processors, and assign weights to vCPU processing priorities...