Deploying XenApp 6.5 in a virtualized environment

Deploying virtualized XenApp farms today is a common scenario for any Citrix environment. In this chapter, we will help William Empire from Brick Unit Construction to evaluate XenApp 6.5 on leading bare metal hypervisors in the market: Citrix XenServer, VMware ESX vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Hypervisors allow multiple operating systems, called guests, to run concurrently on a host computer, a feature called hardware virtualization. The hypervisor presents to the guest operating systems a virtual operating platform and monitors the execution of the guest operating systems. Multiple instances of a variety of operating systems may share the virtualized hardware resources. Bare metal hypervisors run directly on the host's hardware to control the hardware and to monitor guest operating systems.

There are many good reasons to virtualize XenApp 6.5 farms, including:

• Faster server and application provisioning: In a (standard) non-virtualized environment...