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citrix

  • 1.  citrix

    Posted Jan 05, 2007 03:12 PM

    We are looking at implementing ESX 3.0.1 with Citrix presentation server 4.

    For those out there thats done this can you please share your experience pro cons etc? I keep hearing people saying that Citrix is horrible in VM's also I hear some that state if its deployed correctly you will not have any problems.



  • 2.  RE: citrix

    Posted Jan 05, 2007 04:58 PM

    I haven't done anything like that yet, other than the management pieces, but you might check out this whitepaper[/url]. I'm going to be looking into this in the next year since our server hardware is going out of warranty.



  • 3.  RE: citrix

    Posted Jan 06, 2007 11:25 AM

    Terminal server prefromance has improved dramatically in VI3 over 2.5.x VMware, you still will not get as many users per machine as you would in the physical world but it is now approaching acceptable for production.



  • 4.  RE: citrix

    Posted Jan 28, 2007 07:06 AM

    I'm actually in the middle of performing such an installation (should be finished next week).

    If things go well, I'll post any useful info. If things don't go well, I'll post back asking if anyone knows someone that is hiring.



  • 5.  RE: citrix

    Posted Jan 28, 2007 06:59 PM

    We are running a Citrix Farm with 5 Servers. There are 2 physical machines W2k3 with PS 4.0 and 3 VMs W2k3 and PS4.0. We have several apps in production state as well as we are testing to deploy more apps that way. We also testing the Remote Desktop Broker.

    From my point of view:

    Pro's

    \- very nice handling of the Citrix virtual nodes (Templating, Cloning, etc.) so we are able to roll out new applications very quick. We just set up a new node, configure it and then clone it and bring it into the farm.

    \- Clustering, in addition to the Citrix farm we have the DRS and HA functionality of VMware. With that we sleep much better :smileywink:

    Con's

    \- overhead of the virtualization layer, according to papers of VMware it's around 15% plus the overhead of the guest OS

    \- I don't know any other con's

    For us this is acceptable because we are very flexible running our farm in a "mixed mode" :smileywink:



  • 6.  RE: citrix

    Posted Jan 29, 2007 05:11 PM

    I know a lots of case where it done perfectly, there a lots of points to validate first and many best-practice to follow.

    First, I hope that your physical server hosting ESX aren't with NUME technologie, otherwise you have to do NUMA memory affinity (each VM citrix only run on one memory bank).

    Do not activate Hyper Treating and preferable to not vSMP for your Citrix VMs (you'll get lower overhead).

    Prefer use Windows2K3 in your guest OS, it would be better than Windows2000.



  • 7.  RE: citrix

    Posted Mar 07, 2007 08:27 AM

    We have implemented 16 presentation 4 servers on ESX3.0.1

    First impressions were pretty average with a lot of user compaint in regard to performance. We do however have many users that open 5 or 6 Excel spreadsheets that are more than 20 MB in size. We also had Citrix virtual servers on the same physical box as other production virtual servers

    All Citrix servers run the basic app package (office, adobe etc) + around 12 custom busniness applications such as finance apps, document storage, and bespoke apps.

    An article has just been released by VMware that proposes excellent Citrix performance on ESX3 on HPDL585 hardware which we are using. The test involved having only 8 virtual machines on each physical box and physically assigning one CPU core per VM.

    We have since spread all 16 presentation servers amongst two dedicated physical boxes and performance has increased significantly.

    We are now trialing asigning a physical CPU core per VM on one physical box to see how this goes, will let you know.

    We have thrown out the idea that you can put 10 - 20 virtual Citrix servers per physical box.

    We have also found that the user cut off limit for each presentation server is about 16-18 users.

    Any user who was used to working on apps at remote site love Citrix on ESX, even with our average performance originally.

    Any Head Office user who is used to working on fat applications tend to notice the performance reduction more.



  • 8.  RE: citrix

    Posted Mar 07, 2007 08:36 AM

    Here's two good VMworld presentations that talk about using Citrix and Vmware together.

    http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/med0115.pdf

    http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9728.pdf



  • 9.  RE: citrix

    Posted Mar 08, 2007 01:34 AM

    Anyone had issues with Citrix server snapshots and Resource Manager data? I'm curious what happens when citrix server connects to datastore with old Resource Manager data...

    I don't have any solid experience with citrix on vmware yet, however we are just now getting ready for some testing and benchmarking.

    I'm concerned that other production VM's will affect the end-user experience of the citrix servers. It seems that my users are more concerned about their experience in citrix, than the hardware cost.



  • 10.  RE: citrix

    Posted Mar 08, 2007 07:03 PM

    With the combination of resource-intensive apps and the standard Office apps running from your Citrix servers, you might want to consider publishing your Office apps from Virtual Citrix PS4 servers and then publish your resource-intensive apps from bare metal hardware servers. Also, you might want to consider limiting how many copies of the same app a user can utilize within a Citrix session.

    That has worked for me in the past to get an acceptable balance of response time for Citrix end-users while still taking advantage of Virtual Citrixing.

    You're still looking at a possible ballpark max user density of no more than 20 users per Virtual Citrix server in any case. Remember to do the normal things to get better VM performance such as disabling serial ports, cdroms and floppy drives in the VM configuration and the bootup VM BIOS.

    Datto



  • 11.  RE: citrix

    Posted Mar 08, 2007 09:45 PM

    Datto, says some sensible things here, the use of silos to seperate your resource intensive apps on phyiscal servers and your light office based applications on virtual apps could save your money in the long run.

    again do not expect the 60 to 70 user mark on a virtual CTX server



  • 12.  RE: citrix

    Posted Mar 15, 2007 02:19 PM

    I though the big pro of using Citrix on VMWare is the 4GB limit on 32bit TS, and that you could run 4 multiple guests (1VCPU and 4GB) on a 2-way dual core, as opposed to buyiing four 1CPU, 4Gb pizza boxes. I am not a citrix person so i may be wrong. Also, it depends on the app as you have mentioned.