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

VMware virtual CPUs


The latest VMware ESXi hypervisors don't use emulation, they use hardware-assisted virtualization, taking advantage of the extensions in the Intel VT-x and AMD-V technologies.

The VMware ESXi hypervisor time-slices the physical processors across all virtual machines so that each virtual machine gets a piece of the action. This abstraction is what allows you to assign virtual CPUs to virtual machines. If multiple virtual machines are running, the ESXi hypervisor allocates a share or slice of the physical processors to each virtual machine. If the default resource allocations are used, then all virtual machines get an equal share of resources.

Shares, reservations, and limits

When available resource capacity does not meet the demand of the virtualization overhead and virtual machines, customization of resource allocations is possible in ESXi through the vSphere Web Client.

If a virtual machine is assigned twice as many shares of a resource, such as a vCPU, than another virtual...