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

XenDesktop® site sizing calculations


Now that you understand XenDesktop architectures, terminology, concepts, components, system requirements, and hypervisors, it's time to size up your installation. Sizing is a critical first step in your design because it will generate a blueprint on how much and how big your infrastructure will need to be. Don't worry; it's not rocket science. We start with simple principles of small, medium, large, and beyond while using basic math.

You start out with something that you know, which is the number of users you plan to serve desktops to. You can then determine which category your deployment will fall into, such as small, medium, large, or beyond.

Note

All of the calculations given in the following table and in the accompanying sizing spreadsheet have hypervisor "overhead" capacity built in.

The following table explains the variables used in the calculations described in the preceding section:

Variable

Description

vCPUs

This is the number of virtual CPUs...