Citrix: Virtualization Best Practices for XenApp

Daniel Feller posted another great blogpost on Virtualization Best Practices for XenApp at the Citrix Blogs

 

One of the first questions when virtualizing XenApp is how many VMs to put on a server. Well, that was discussed in the Virtualize XenApp blog. Once you figure out how you plan to carve up the physical server, one of the next common questions is deciding which features of the hypervisor to enable/disable. For example, if I use XenServer, should I use the “Optimize for XenApp” setting? What about vSphere’s Transparent Page Sharing feature? And the big whopper, how should I allocate memory to my virtualized XenApp servers? Is it safe to use dynamic memory or am I safer to stick with fixed memory?

The following table is what Citrix Consulting has seen and recommends. By the way, if you want the entire discussion on virtualizing XenApp, then go to the XenDesktop Design Handbook and look in the Planning Guide section for Virtualization Best Practices for XenApp.
Decision Justification Hypervisor
Overcommit CPU:
No
It is advisable not to allocate more vCPU than there are physical cores within the given hardware. Experience has shown that greater levels of scalability are achieved by not overcommitting CPU.
Hyper-V
XenServer
vSphere
Utilize Hyper-threading:
Yes
Newer processors have the ability to do hyper-threading, where each core is two logical cores. Utilizing hyper-threading in a XenApp environment has been shown to improve user density.
Hyper-V
XenServer
vSphere
Disable ASLR: No As many organizations try to protect their XenApp servers from viruses, malware and other OS exploits, it is advisable to keep Address Space Layout Randomization enabled, which is the default setting. The functionality is included with Windows 2008, Windows 2008 R2, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
Hyper-V
XenServer
vSphere
Enable Transparent Page Sharing:
Depends on OS
Enabling or disabling Transparent Page Sharing has not been shown to either help or hurt performance on newer systems (Windows 2008, Windows 2008 R2, Windows Vista and Windows 7). However, older systems (Windows 2003 and Windows XP) have benefited, mostly because the page sizes are smaller (4K), thus making it easier to share pages of memory. vSphere
Optimize for XenApp:
N/A
On systems utilizing pre-Nehalem processors, the XenServer setting “Optimize for XenApp” provided increased scalability. Since the release of the Nehalem processors, much of the functionality has been placed on the hardware so this particular XenServer setting can be ignored. XenServer
Disk Alignment: Yes As a host server will be running multiple instances of a server operating system, it is even more important to optimize the disk subsystem to improve performance and scalability as opposed to a system running a single operating system. Windows 2003 is misaligned with default installations. This should be corrected installation to help reduce storage impact.
XenServer
Hyper-V
vSphere
Memory Allocation:
Fixed
As users are dynamically load balanced across XenApp servers, memory usage between different virtual machines should be similar, helping negate the need for dynamic memory allocation techniques. Also, if VM migration strategies are used, this could cause memory overcommit resulting in aggressive paging and poor performance across all XenApp virtual machines. It is advisable to set fixed values for memory reservations for XenApp virtual machines. XenServer
Hyper-V

vSphere
Host Swapping: No In most environments, all XenApp servers are actively hosting users at the same time. Swapping out memory from one XenApp host will degrade performance for all virtual machines as the memory keeps getting transferred to/from disk. vSphere
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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is a Staff Solutions Architect for End User Computing at Nutanix. Kees has driven numerous Microsoft and Citrix, and RES infrastructures functional/technical designs, migrations, implementations engagements over the years.

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