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May, 2012
XenApp & XenDesktopBest Practices
Andy Baker & Thomas Berger
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2012 Citrix | ConfidentialDo Not Distribute
Introduction
Why did you create a best practicesdocument?
What is a best practice anyway?
Appropriate at least 80% of the time
Provides a good starting point
Where do the best practices come from? Lessons learned
Engineering
Testing
Customer feedback
Desktops
Users
Applications
Personalizatio
Access
Hardware
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Best PracticesTop 10
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#1: Scale Up or Out?
There are many components: Hardware & appliances Infrastructure servers
XenApp servers
Theres a lot to consider: Available space
Cooling & power capacity
Hardware & maintenance costs
Single points of failure
Too many eggs
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#2: Hyper-threading
Allows single physical processor to appear as twovirtual cores
Can increase user density per VM (XenApp) and
VM density per host (XenApp and XenDesktop)
Typical performance boost of between 20-30% -
NOT 100%!
My not be beneficial in every situationwill
depend on workload
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#3: Processor and Memory Overcommit
XenApp Users per core30 [Light], 15 [Medium], 7 [Heavy] 1 to 1 mapping between vCPUs and cores
Dont overcommit memory
XenDesktop Users per core - 10 [Light], 6 [Medium], 2 [Heavy]
Careful when overcommitting memory (5-10%)
Dont forget the hypervisor!
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#4: XenServer Pool Design
Separate resource pools for: Control infrastructure XenDesktop
XenApp
Maximum pool size: 16 hosts without single image technology
12 hosts with PVS
8 hosts with MCS
Redundancy Enable HA
Specify multiple servers in host connection
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#5: XenServer 6.02 Optimizations
Use processors that support nested paging and second level addr Extended Page Tables (Intel) Rapid Virtualization Indexing (AMD)
Optimize for XenApp was essentially a software implementation
Disable power saving (Green IT) functions in BIOS
If you have more than 50 VMs per host - increase DOM0 RAM fro
2.94GB Receiver Side Copy (RSC)
Enabled by Default
Work offloaded from DOM0 to guests (increases DOM0 scalability)
Disable for small number of network intensive VMs (e.g. Provisioning Se
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#6: Storage Best Practices
Storage is a very complex topic CTX118397Introduction to Storage Technologies CTX130632Storage Best Practices
Make sure you understand the requirements Storage space vs. Speed
Track the respective Win/XS performance counters i.e.: Physical Disk \ Disk Transfers/sec = IOPS
Monitor disk latency at all times 20ms = Issue
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#7: License Server Redundancy
Typically a single Citrix License Server is
sufficient Grace period of 30 days
5 second delay for new user sessions
Provisioned XA servers are an exception Licenses are cached within a local ini-file
ini-file is updated on IMA startup
CTX131202 describes how to redirect the ini-
file to a network share / persistent disk
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#8: Antivirus Optimizations
Optimizing AV for a virtual desktop environment is
a must.
Follow the recommendations outlined in
CTX127030
In addition Disable scheduled scans (i.e. upon pattern retrieval)
Test new pattern before rollout / stagger the rollout
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#9: PVS Ports & Threads
By default PVS uses 20 TCP ports for streaming
8 Threads per port
= 160 Threads
Every target device uses one thread
when reading from its vDisk
No thread available = queuing = disk latency
# of ports x # of threads/port = max active clients Consider HA scenarios
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#10: Various Items
Have a proper monitoring solution in place Monitoring Guide is coming soon
Perform Capacity Planning
Implement a three-staged test environment at minimum Dev/Test
UAT
Pre-Production Production
Develop/Implement Change Management procedures
Backup your environment / perform restore tests
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Summary
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Summary
Were constantly refining the document Subscribe to the Citrix KB RSS feed
Subscribe to the XD Handbook (http://bit.ly/xdhandbook)
..or check CTX132799 every month or so
If you have feedback / suggestions drop us a mail Andy Baker ([email protected])
Thomas Berger ([email protected])
http://bit.ly/xdhandbookmailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://bit.ly/xdhandbook8/13/2019 Coazo Citrix juas
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Q&A
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Work better. Live better.
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