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 vCPU tweaks


The following tweaks help you tune performance with regards to CPUs in Hyper-V.

Integration services and Enlightened I/O

There are two things that are absolute musts to get any performance out of Hyper-V. Enable integration services on both the Hyper-V hypervisor (Windows server) and on the virtual machines (Windows 7, 8). This will ensure that the necessary code (the drivers) will be installed into the virtual machine (Windows 7, 8) to allow it take advantage of Hyper-V Enlightened I/O.

Roles

Don't run any other roles on the Windows server. If you need other roles such as DHCP or DNS, run those inside of a virtual machine. Yes, you can run Windows server on a virtual machine on Hyper-V – which runs on Windows server.

64 versus 32

Try to run 64 bit virtual machines. 32 bit operating systems can only address 4 GB of memory, of which, processes can use up to 2 GB.

1:12 overcommit ratio

In Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft recommends not overcommitting over the 1:12 ratio of CPU...