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

Virtual CPUs


A Virtual CPU (vCPU) is an abstraction or representation of the physical CPU. As you can imagine, if you have hundreds, if not thousands, of virtual machines running on your servers, they will all be competing for the CPU. Luckily, the integration between the CPU manufacturers and the hypervisors means that these resources can be shared and overcommitted.

Virtual CPUs or vCPUs are assigned to virtual machines when you create them, either by the hypervisor virtual machine manager or by the CLI. The beautiful thing about vCPUs is that you can carve them up any way you see fit to meet your computing requirements.

In the early 1990's vCPUs had to be emulated, which is why many emulation techniques are still around as artifacts. All of the virtualization tasks were handled through software emulation, which was slow and inefficient. The next step was para-virtualization, which allowed virtual machines to bypass the hypervisor with APIs and still offer a performance advantage. Intel...