Do you ever worry about impacting your Citrix users when undertaking operations on your hypervisor? Perhaps you are concerned about shutting down a VM or host that has important user sessions running? Having to jump between multiple consoles to be sure you are doing the right thing can be time consuming and error prone reducing your confidence that you are safe to do what … [Read more...] about Enhance XenServer management with Citrix workload awareness
Optimizing MCS workloads with XenServer
Recently, I’ve written several blogs about the various optimizations technologies XenServer provides for Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) workloads. You might wonder which ones you should use and how these all fit together. The previous blogs have already explained the XenServer IntelliCache and Read Caching techniques, however MCS additionally provides a … [Read more...] about Optimizing MCS workloads with XenServer
Using Read Cache with Citrix Machine Creation Services
The Machine Creation Services or MCS for short is a technology provided by Citrix that enables provisioning of OS images using Hypervisors. This technology allows the distribution of many computers across the enterprise using the disks available in the hypervisor to provide the images. As previously discussed in the article about IntelliCache, MCS is dependent on … [Read more...] about Using Read Cache with Citrix Machine Creation Services
Optimizing Citrix Machine Creation Services with XenServer IntelliCache
Citrix's Machine Creation Services, or MCS, is one of the industry's best mechanisms for delivering virtual desktops at scale. However, If you are using a hypervisor that is not optimized for Citrix, virtual desktop reboots and Machine Catalog updates might take more time while putting more load on your storage. This can lead to a poor user experience, frustrated … [Read more...] about Optimizing Citrix Machine Creation Services with XenServer IntelliCache
Optimizing Citrix PVS with XenServer PVS Accelerator
When talking to customers of bigger Citrix on-prem deployments, the most liked feature that they mention is that 'it just works'. As a good second, the XenServer PVS Accelerator is mentioned without exceptions. This is understandable, as starting or making changes to a large number of VMs will bring most networks to it's limits. This is why features like PVS Accelerator are so … [Read more...] about Optimizing Citrix PVS with XenServer PVS Accelerator