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 Tools


In terms of tools, Hyper-V uses a Windows server virtualization feature called Enlightened I/O. Enlightened I/O is the performance tweak analogous to hardware-assisted virtualization integration used in VMware and XenServer. Enlightened I/O is a virtualization technique that is aware of high-level protocols that can access the VMBus directly, bypassing any device emulation layer. This requires that the hypervisor and virtual machine be aware of each other so that the virtual machine can take advantage of accessing the VMbus directly.

Microsoft does provide similar performance-enhancing ability through what they call Enlightened I/O. The Enlightened I/O and the Hyper-V-aware kernel are turned on by installing the Hyper-V Integration Service. Hyper-V and the root / child partition architecture require a processor that includes HAV, which is provided with Intel VT and AMD-V technologies. Hyper-V takes advantage of the processor hardware-assisted virtualization available from Intel...