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 vCPU tweaks


The following tweaks help you tune performance with regards to CPUs in VMware.

Power management

Any form of power management adds latency to a VM. Adjust the BIOS setting for power management to static high so that no OS-controlled power management can engage on the virtual machines. There is a trade off between running cool and lean, so this setting is up to you.

Power settings differ between server manufacturers but you will want to disable power management for C-States, C1E Support, and QPI Power. You will want to enable Turbo Mode or Turbo Boost. You will want to set any power management modes to maximum performance.

NUMA in VMware

NUMA is cache memory for the CPU. NUMA architectures add latency and slow performance. ESXi uses a NUMA-aware scheduler to dynamically balance processor load and memory locality. For best performance, all vCPUs should be scheduled on the same NUMA node and all VM memory should fit and be allocated out of the local physical memory attached to...