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

Full virtualization


Full virtualization (FV) is a complete virtual emulation of the physical hardware where every feature and function of the physical hardware is made available to virtual machines including interrupts, memory access, network functions, storage, CPUs, and instruction sets.

Full virtualization was initially attractive and useful because you could run any operating system as a virtual machine. The downside is that it is very slow because the hypervisor must emulate all the physical devices in the server in order to run the VM. Some hypervisors, like XenServer, automatically turn on paravirtualization drivers when running machines in full virtualization.

Note

In full virtualization, the underlying hardware is emulated by the hypervisor. The virtual machine is unaware of the hypervisor and the simulation taking place. For this reason, full virtualization virtual machines can be slow.