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® monitoring tools


When monitoring XenDesktop on XenServer, take note of the tools mentioned in the following sections:

GUI tools

XenCenter is the GUI application that is used to manage and monitor XenServer. XenCenter runs on a Windows OS either on a physical or virtual machine. Not only is this an easy to use interface for creating resources, it contains valuable metrics for performance management, including some easy to read graphs. Complete details on XenCenter performance graphs can be found in the XenCenter Help. The metrics available in XenCenter provide valuable insight into memory CPU, network, and storage performance:

CLI tools

When monitoring XenDesktop on XenServer, take note of the following CLI tools.

Round Robin Databases

XenServer uses Round Robin Databases (RRDs) to store performance metrics which consist of multiple Round Robin Archives (RRAs)—circular buffers with predefined capacity.

Tip

More information on RRDs can be found at http://bit.ly/xenrrds.

A complete list...