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

Hypervisor memory optimization


Hypervisors have certainly come a long way over the years. As of late, hypervisor vendors have gained enough traction in the market that they have wielded relationships with CPU and chip manufacturers such as Intel, AMD, and NVidia, in addition to the memory, storage, and network manufacturers. Today, when you go to buy a machine to run a hypervisor, there are built-in integrations between the hypervisor software and the physical hardware.

As of this writing, there are two types of hypervisors: Type-1 and Type-2. Also, there are four publicly available and usable hypervisors: VMware vSphere/ESXi, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Linux open source Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM). XenDesktop is only supported on ESXi, XenServer, and Hyper-V, so we will limit our discussion to those.

No two physical server architectures are the same, and there is more than one server vendor. Some of these vendors you are familiar with, such as Hewlett Packard (HP), Dell, IBM...