While answering another XA6.5 and PVS 6.1 question for someone else just a few minutes ago, I came across these articles:
http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/12/05/deploy-xenapp-6-5-using-pvs-6-1-part-1/ http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/12/12/deploy-xenapp-6-5-using-pvs-6-1-part-2/ Thanks Webster From: Sean Martin [mailto:seanmarti...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 10:58 AM To: NT System Admin Issues 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 ~ 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
