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 networking tweaks


There are some capabilities of the Hyper-V vSwitch that can actually benefit a XenDesktop deployment, such as the following:

  • Bandwidth limit and burst support has two settings. Bandwidth minimum guarantees an amount of bandwidth reserved. Bandwidth maximum caps the amount of bandwidth a VM can consume. These options are set per VM.

  • Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) marking, also known as Datacenter TCP (DCTCP), enables the physical switch and the operating system to regulate traffic flow such that the buffer resources of the switch are not flooded, resulting in increased traffic throughput.

    One setting that might be useful is the Bandwidth Management setting for the virtual network adapter. If you open the virtual network adapter in Hyper-V, you will see a section called Bandwidth Management. Here, you can set minimum and maximum bandwidth in megabytes per second. This can help keep noisy virtual machines from starving the bandwidth on the Hyper-V host, but you...