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

Network virtualization


As we saw from earlier chapters, hardware virtualization is a challenge. Virtualizing the network is also a challenge. If you think about it, when we collapse computers into virtual machines, the networks they had been connected to are no longer physical switches and routers. In the virtualization world, the networks are collapsed and virtualized as well.

Network virtualization is the process of combining hardware and software network resources, such as routers and switches, into software-based entities that are run inside the physical machine. In other words, think about connecting a server's NIC to a physical switch using an Ethernet cable and assigning the computer to a VLAN. Now, think of that computer running as a virtual machine and creating a logical connection from a virtual network interface card to an internal software based switch, and then assigning the VLAN there. The concept seems fairly simple to imagine; however, the details surrounding the new paradigm...