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

Input/output operations per second


Input/Output operations per second is a commonly talked about measurement of performance with regards to storage. It was mentioned early in this chapter; so think about how you will be impacted by IOPS. For Lab and Proof of Concept deployments, IOPS may not affect you that much. If you are deploying XenDesktop for production use, IOPS adds up and it will affect you.

If you think about it, this makes sense. Before virtualization, you had one person or just a handful, accessing the hard drive for data. Now, you have hundreds or thousands of users accessing hard drive data and storage was never really engineered for that type of usage. The industry and some startups are just now getting around to solving the problem.

For regular virtualization environments this problem is almost non-existent – but for SBC and VDI it does exist. It would also be nice to virtualize the I/O traffic flow for regular office workers (with local resources) versus VDI users (where the...