Virtualize Terminal Services

[zenariga]

Hello all,

I want to migrate my 56 Windows 2003 Terminal Services server to VMWare Environment, anyone have or know a best practice for this?

Anyone have a doc about this? I need to show this to my boos. Any doc with performance, and other information about TS virtualization.

I found this link: http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2009/01/virtualizing-xenapp-on-xenserver-50-and-esx-35-1.html, but I need a newer, because here we have vSphere and probaly have much more benefits.

Thanks,

[gary1012]

I think you're going to find updated info for vSphere hosting WTS/Citrix scarce. Here's a link for virtualizing WTS and many of the points will most likely still be relevant. This link says it's for Citrix, but it will help with WTS too.

[aleph0]

The second link from the previous post is the best you can find on the WEB about virtualizing Citrix TS!!

Basically:

1. do not P2V.

2. Go with one vCPU

3. A lot of memory but no memory balloning activated

Cheers

\aleph0

____________________________

(in italian)

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[kenstout]

I've just finished off migrating an application from old hardware MTS to new a new VM. We initially gave it 1 vCPU, but had to move it to 2 vCPUs due to processor load, at the suggestion of VMware enterprise support. The VM was very unhappy with just one vCPU.

It has a mix of thin clients and desktops all using RDP and about 30 -32 user sessions during peak times. We have to redirect COM ports communications from the thin clients so we have a lot of overhead.

I agree with clean VM install. no p2v for this. We tried p2v initially for acceptance testing, the VM never really behaved properly.

[aleph0]

Do you reinstall VM with 2 vCPUs or just added one mor vCPU. In Windows SMP kernel get configured at installation time: if you start with 1 vCPU you'll load a single CPU Windows kernel...

HTH

[gary1012]

The general recommendation for any VM is to start with one vCPU due to way the ESX kernel does processor scheduling. Here's a link to the vSMP guide that might be helpful. It's pretty easy to add another and change the HAL if needed.

[azn2kew]

I would still use same best practices to tweak Citrix/TS servers in ESX environment. I do not suggest to P2V any Citix or TS servers but rather create master image with all apps/patches loaded and then deploy from template as many as you want. I would alway start with 1vCPU and 1024MB of RAM and stress test it and add every 5 users and keep doing it until you see performance bottleneck. Add more RAM to adjust the number of users connection between 25-35 would be good for virtual machine and that also depends on applications/load you use in your environment and you might expect less and differences with x32 or x64 bit solutions. You would be able to run Citrix server between 2-4GB of RAM easily and max you can give is 2vCPU if needed ONLY. If more than 2vCPU you will experience performance issue due to co-scheduling to wait enough processors to accommodate each request which is not recommended to use vSMP when not needed.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[Dr_Virt]

I just spent the past week testing and tweaking trying to find the cause of issues within our new Windows 2008 TS VM.

Interesting thing, the resolution was to modify the Intel E1000 network inteface. I disabled all offload functions and enabled flow control, disabled all high level functions, and tested. Night and day.

[MHAV]

A guy told me the other day that he tested a lot with Terminal Servers on VMware and he found out that using the Enterprise Edition is much better than using the Standard Edition of Windows. Makes sense to me plus you save money with the Windows Licenses.

Regards

Michael Haverbeck

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[Josh26]

Are you sure you don't mean "Windows Datacenter Edition" ? This avoids you buying licenses for all your VMs as it includes "unlimited virtualization rights".

According to here:

The only difference between enterprise and standard is failover clustering, which isn't going to help an environment that's already clustered by virtue of you having several terminal services VMs.

In a testing environment where you're presumably not worried about licenses, the only thing I could find Standard edition lacking in is the ability to hotadd memory, which isn't really that big a deal.

[meistermn]

There is much more differenc between datacenter and entprise of Windows 2008.

The hot add and replace features of cpu and ram, .

The main problem with datacenter is that many application at setup , tells that it is the wrong windows version.

More about ms licencing

Page 26 is all abot Windows 2008 datacenter

[Josh26]

meistermn wrote:

>There is much more differenc between datacenter and entprise of Windows 2008.

>The hot add and replace features of cpu and ram,

I did say that on the last line of my post.

The context of my message was with regards to virtualizing a Terminal Services farm to a VMWare farm, and this quote:

> tested a lot with Terminal Servers on VMware and he found out that using the Enterprise Edition is much better than using the Standard Edition of Windows

My point being that, the way I read this post suggested that this farm would virtualize much easier under Enterprise edition, whereas I could not find any additional feature of Enterprise edition that would actually make it virtualize better than Standard edition.

Whilst the ability to hotadd RAM is a nifty one, if you were unhappy with performance after virtualizing Windows Standard Edition, I don't believe being able to add RAM without rebooting the guest is going to satisfy you. Particularly if you have a farm, it's usually quite easy to arrange a reboot (set it to accept no new connections, wait until everyone's off it, reboot).

It was myself that brought Datacenter edition into the discussion by pointing out the licensing benefits, and again, I don't see any benefits of this edition that actually make it run "much better" on VMWare.

[frank_wegner]

Hi Stefan, the recommendations for Terminal Services in a VM are relaxing with vSphere and Nehalem CPUs. One of my customers is using Blade Servers with 4 dual-core Nehalem CPUs and 48 GB RAM. They found that they get by far the best performance and highest number of sessions on one physical host by using this configuration:

4 VMs with Terminal Services, and each VM has 4 vCPUs and 11 GB RAM (no memory overcommitment). Windows 2003 Enterprise licenses. The 4 vCPUs scale perfectly well especially during high-load times when a lot of people log on concurrently in the morning. Each VM supports between 40 and 50 terminal server end users. That makes 160 to 200 user for one ESX Host.

They could also go with 10 smaller VMs, but this does not support so many user sessions, plus if you have more systems you have more management overhead, and probably more software licenses to buy.

In the end it is strongly recommended to do your own PoC to see what works best for your workloads.

[dquintana]

Exist a lot of best practices.

1. Use paravirtualized drivers in the hard disk drivers for de vms

2. Tune the video definition to 16 bits

3. Disable screen savers

4. Put by default one vprocesor except if need REALLy more.

5. No more than 10 vms per lun

6. No more 500 GB Lun

7. Create thin provitioned vms except for the DB disk of the vms.

8. Use a tunned Template of 2003, disable all the unncesary services, apply SP, instsall vmware tools, and then drefrag

9. Re align the partitions

10. If you can, use NTP physical servers.

Regards

Ing. Diego Quintana

VCP4 - VCP3 -VAC - VTSP

http:
www.wetcom.com.ar

[Jbrock_Consulti]

I am looking to do a similar project, upgrade to 64bit vitual server and consolidate current application servers