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

QoS


The most appropriate place to discuss quality of service (QoS) is in the networking section. We discuss QoS for XenDesktop here.

ICA/HDX virtual channels

Citrix supports QoS with the ICA/HDX protocol, and it is supported in the Citrix Receiver, as well. Within the ICA/HDX protocol, they have what are called virtual channels. Virtual channels exist so that control can be applied to specific functions such as printing, audio, keyboard, mouse, video, drive mapping, and so on. There are 32 maximum channels available for each ICA/HDX session. The following diagram shows the architecture of virtual channel:

Multi-stream and multi-port

Multi-stream ICA/HDX provides the ability to configure multiple TCP connections to carry the ICA/HDX traffic between client and server. You can have up to four independent TCP streams, and up to five independent UDP streams. Each of these streams can be associated with a different class of service for QoS.

You can configure the class of service for each stream by...