Citrix Desktop VMware best practice

[lukeglazebrook]

Hi All,

Just a quick question, I'm fairly sure I stumbled across a Citrix document a while back (which I can no longer find).   It was effectively a white paper selling the benefits of choosing to place Citrix on vSphere.  Specifically one of those benefits was utilizing DRS in conjunction with Citrix Desktop.  In out environment for some unknown reasons a decision was taken at some point to disable DRS for mysterious unknown reasons.  A quote that I keep overhearing is "we don't want Citrix load balancing to be fighting/interfering with VMware" personally I'm not convinced this will cause any issues, but I could be mistaken.

Two questions really, has anyone ever heard of a good reasons to disable DRS in conjunction with Citrix Desktop?  Additionally does anyone have a link to any documentation supporting the benefits of having it enabled or supporting it being enabled.  Thanks in advance, I haven't had much exposure with Citrix other than Xenserver really.

[ArnoM]

Personally I would always use DRS with the setting Fully Automated, Conservative.

This means DRS will only move the VM's when there's a resource imbalance between the hypervisor host.

There is also the benifit with DRS affinity rules to not have certain Citrix servers on the same host.

[lukeglazebrook]

Thanks those were my thoughts exactly, are you aware of any official best practice documents advising to specifically enable DRS for Citrix.

[Walter Scott]

You typically don't want DRS enabled for VM's to vmotion since it will cause an unnatural freezing to the end user. 

[mike_tp]

I've always run Citrix (VDI and XenApp shared) with partly automated DRS - you don't want user logins to spike the CPU on a VM and then cause DRS to shift it when it is just a transient spike, but you do want to vMotion if shutting down a host for maintenance.  Just ensure you have your VMs spread across the hosts such that they reflect the needs of the various workloads.