We haven't gone through the low-level design process for each of the deliverables yet, so I am not sure if we're using that feature. Is that a part of the Environment Manager? Our implementation of AppSense is purely for a profile management solution because of the garbage that roaming profiles makes us deal with in our current environment.
- Sean On Feb 28, 2013, at 8:03 AM, kz2...@googlemail.com wrote: > Are you using the AppSense Personalization Server feature? That's going to > have a big influence on your requirements if you are. > > Sent from my Blackberry, which may be an antique but delivers email RELIABLY > From: Sean Martin <seanmarti...@gmail.com> > Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 07:58:09 -0900 > To: NT System Admin Issues<ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com> > ReplyTo: "NT System Admin Issues" <ntsysadmin@lyris.sunbelt-software.com> > Subject: Vmware Design for XenApp 6.5 w/PVS > > Hello everyone, > > Let me start first by apologize for the length of this message. In my pursuit > of providing all of the relevant information I fully expect for this to be a > bit long winded. > > We're in the final planning stages of a migration from a purely physical > XenApp 5 on Windows 2003 environment to a virtualized XenApp 6.5 with > Provisioning Services environment on ESXi 5.0. I was hoping I could toss out > our initial design and gather some feedback. > > Our current environment consists of a single farm, two sites, and just under > 200 physical servers. That includes the SQL server, data collectors, existing > Web Interface servers, licensing server and all of the presentation servers. > We currently support 12 application silos. The purpose of each silo varies > from application compatibility issues, business unit requirements, > performance requirements, etc. At our peak, we support approximately 1400 > concurrent sessions. This is the number we've used to design our future > environment. > > The new environment will consist of a dedicated vSphere Cluster for the > XenApp servers (using provisioning services). Other supporting services (SQL > Server, zone data collectors, licensing server, etc.) will be supported in a > general vSphere cluster. Web Interface will be migrated to NetScaler > Appliances. We will also be deploying AppSense Environment Manager and using > AppDNA to validate application compatibility. > > Anyway, my specific responsibility is to forcast the infrastructure > requirements and work directly with our Citrix Admins. I used the following > article as the primary reference material for starting our design. We decided > to plan conservatively and base our consolidation ratios with a 20 users per > guest target. The host config I've decided on are Dell PowerEdge R820s with > Quad E5-4640 2.4GHz 8 core procs and 384GB RAM. Using the recommendation of > 4vCPUs per guest we can support 16VMs per host which equates to 320 users per > host. 5 hosts will allow us to support a peak of 1600 concurrent user > sessions. We will purchase 6 hosts to maintain our N+1 cluster design > standards. I dediced to bump the RAM per host considerably to allow for > increased guest allocation. We support over 200 published applications in our > environment, which are distributed amongst physical server silos currently. > One of our goals with PVS is to consolidate the applications into as few > images as possible si we want to certain we have the hardware resources to > support the guests. Each host will include a FusionIO IO Drive to support > maximum IO requirements and eliminate IO contention on our SAN during large > scale provisioning. All of our hosts leverage infiniband with 80Gbps > throughput for ethernet and native FC connectivity. > > http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/01/07/whats-the-optimal-xenapp-6-5-vm-configuration/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CitrixBlogs+%28Citrix+Blogs%29 > > So after reading all of that I feel like I'm bragging. However, I have a > fundemental concern because even though we are being very conservative and > are likely procuring more resources than necessary, I have no reliable means > of validating the capabilities of this proposed environment vs. our current > workloads. My experience with Vmware tells me that even though the > aforementioned article suggests a 4 vCPU per guest configuration, we'll > likely start with a single vCPU configuration and do our best at initial > scalability testing while keeping an eye on CPU waits. Should we find guests > perform optimally with few vCPUs than that will just increase our > consolidation ratios. > > I'm hoping some of you out there with a lot of XenApp experience (Webster, > James, etc.:) ) can either point out any major gaps in the initial hardware > design or hopefully validate that we're more than likely over provisioning > hardware resources. > > - Sean > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ > > --- > To manage subscriptions click here: > http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ > or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com > with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ > ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ > > --- > To manage subscriptions click here: > http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ > or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com > with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
