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

Traffic separation


Some concepts play well with optimization no matter what hypervisor you are running. Traffic separation is one of those concepts. It is a good idea to separate your traffic into separate network interfaces for performance and manageability reasons. Two port 10 GbE interface cards are becoming more of a commodity, so you best look into using those. 10 GbE and 1 GbE NICs are common now, and it used to be that when we only had 100 MbE interface cards, Citrix recommended separating traffic in the following way:

Interface

Traffic type

Network Interface 1

Management/HA

Network Interface 2

Virtual machine traffic

Network Interface 3

iSCSI/NFS/NAS/Backup

Network Interface 4

Provisioning

Now, with the proliferation of higher speed networks that are 10 GbE and 1 GbE, separating traffic is a thing of the past and not really recommended.

If your traffic requirements are low enough that you won't saturate a 10 GbE interface, you could conceptually have one 10 GbE NIC and use...