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

XenDesktop® Director and EdgeSight®


Back in the Citrix Presentation Server days, Citrix bought a technology called EdgeSight that could monitor user sessions, especially the ICA protocol which is patented by Citrix. EdgeSight was useful, but difficult to implement and use. Hence, a robust ecosystem of partners did a much better job of it.

Any partner could integrate with Citrix by just asking for the ICA specification and signing an NDA. Citrix would hand out the ICA protocol details and APIs to as many partners as they could. This was actually a good thing, because Citrix doesn't do reporting and monitoring very well. Later on there was some angst in business development circles about handing out the ICA protocol so freely, as some competitors ended up with the specification. It didn't really matter because this strategy has served Citrix well.

Citrix later added other features to the protocol and branded them as the High Definition eXperience (HDX), but it is still the same ICA protocol...