running Citrix with ESX 3.5 farm?

[vmwareluverz]

i'm planning to run Citrix XenApp with ESX 3.5 farm anyone has any good details instructions how to maximize performance. i've read best practices to tweak in VMs but saw posts on brianmadden.com people experiencing bad performance. anyone here has any farm runnning vmware/citrix with large scale about 30+ citrix servers. please give your thoughts and experience for this is good

[khughes]

Well we're not a large scale like you have, but we run our citrix farm inside of ESX. We haven't noticed any real performance issues switching from physical to virtual, but then again we only run 5 servers. Here is an article I looked at a little bit when we were doing our conversion.

• Kyle

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Your post has been moved to the VI: Virtual Machine and Guest OS forum

Dave Mishchenko

VMware Communities User Moderator

PS - here's a good thread to look at http://communities.vmware.com/message/863663#863663

[bradley4681]

make sure not to do the default install of the vmware tools, you need to not install the memory ballon driver.

This is about a year old but still applies,

Cheers,

Bradley Sessions

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[williamarrata]

This is an old one too but it gives you a great deal of information about ESX and Citrix working together.

Hope that helped.

[kapi]

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[azn2kew · Accepted solution]

I've deployed several Citrix farms with ESX 3.0.x already and it seems to be a lot of improve in performance prior to ESX 2.5 but with new CPU technologies it should also improve performance as well. Any projects required good planning and maximize tweak to get it through. Like mentioned above, those are the general tweak for ESX/Citrix but also depends on applications you're hosted and neither its desktop/applications hosted environment? I suggest you to tested it on both physical and virtual farm to make sure you get what you expected. I would maximize 20 users per VM and that depends but for general application that's pretty good. You can consult on Brian Madden and Ron Oglesby for details their the evangelists for vmware/citrix as well. There are tools that can help you run it efficiently with www.dabcc.com online.

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Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

[burnswilcox]

Citrix and ESX..

I did a 800 user Citrix Farm, all Virtualized. 12x Dell 2950's 24gb ram, 48 Drive Ibm San.Customers...

With this deployment, we could get 20-22 users per citrix server. In fact, on physical we could only get 18-20 users. Full desktop deployments, with non- Terminal server apps. (40 Heavy Citrix users per u)

4 Citrix servers per VM Host, 2procs, 4 gb ram.

a number of one-off servers. WI's, Citrix CSG's. Edgesite server, SQL servers. in all, 4 Citrix servers per ESX host, and 5-7 one off servers (file servers, silo- ctx servers, test servesr).

Sweet spot, = 6GB nics per ESX host. The packets per second were veryyyy heavy. Adding physical network cards, enabled us to go beyond the typical 20 user per citrix servers (Virtualized)

We did a benchmark (in test pilot), just regular desktops, running MS office, and other Citrix friendly apps, able to go 27-30 users, easily.

We are re-doing our entire citrix environment, on Dell Blades+4 Equallogic SANS + Soft iscsi. We should be able to easily get 80-140 citrix users per ESX host-Blade.