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Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials
Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials

Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials: A practical guide for tuning and optimizing the performance of XenApp farms using real-world examples

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Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials

Chapter 2. Monitoring and Improving Server Performances

The XenApp farm you designed is now in production.

The job of a system administrator starts now. The infrastructure must be monitored and maintained. In addition, unpredictable problems in the design phase may appear or new business requirements may arise, increasing the load of your farm.

In this chapter you'll learn:

  • How to monitor your XenApp infrastructure

  • How to optimize the servers' performance

  • Advanced features of XenApp that offers for performance improvement

Health Monitoring & Recovery


Health Monitoring & Recovery (HMR) is a tool included in Citrix XenApp which you can use to run scheduled tests on your servers to monitor their health, and if a problem is detected, you can automatically perform recovery actions.

It includes a standard set of tests, but you can import additional tests downloaded from the Internet or even develop custom ones.

Standard tests

Following are the tests HMR can perform out of the box:

Test name

Description

Citrix IMA Service test

This test checks if the IMA Service is running on the server enumerating the available applications.

Logon monitor test

This test checks if there are many logon/logoff cycles within a short period on the server; this may indicate possible problems in session initialization or application launch.

You can configure three test parameters specifying the command-line arguments:

  • /SessionTime:sec (default 5 seconds), is the maximum session time for a short logon/logoff cycle

  • /SessionInterval...

Using Citrix performance monitoring counters


When you install XenApp on a Windows server, the setup adds some new performance counters you can access from Windows Performance Monitor. A regular analysis of performance data helps to identify possible bottlenecks or lack of free resources.

Citrix performance counters are grouped into six sections. In the next section, you can find a description of the most significant ones.

Citrix CPU Utilization Mgmt User

The following counters are related to the server's CPU:

Counter name

Description

CPU Entitlement

The percentage of CPU resource that Citrix CPU Utilization Management makes available to a user at a given time.

You'll learn how to configure CPU Utilization Management later in this chapter.

CPU Reservation

The percentage of CPU resource reserved for a user.

CPU Shares

The proportion of CPU resource assigned to a user.

CPU Usage

The percentage of CPU resource consumed by a user, measured in an interval of a few seconds.

Long-term...

CPU Utilization Management


If you're analysing the performance of your farm, in search of possible bottlenecks, you'll most likely find lack of CPU or memory resources.

Citrix CPU Utilization Management is a feature you can enable to improve the way XenApp manages CPU resources and to normalize CPU peaks.

Note

CPU Utilization Management is a feature included in the Enterprise or Platinum edition of XenApp.

When you enable CPU Utilization Management, the server checks the proportion of CPU resource (share) assigned to each user. By default, it assigns the same share to all the users. This prevents one user that executes CPU-intensive operations from impacting the other users on the same session-host servers.

For example, consider a user who is using a spreadsheet to perform complex financial calculations. Without CPU Utilization Management, his session will probably be consuming most of the CPU resources available on the server, slowing down the work of other connected users. With CPU Utilization...

Memory optimization


Each session consumes part of the available memory on your server. If the memory request exceeds the available memory, the operating system needs to swap some of the RAM memory to disk, degrading the overall performance of the server.

The memory optimization feature can reduce the memory utilization improving DLL-sharing among applications.

DLL collisions

A Dynamic Link Library (DLL) is a library that contains code, data, and resources. It can be used by different programs at the same time. By using DLLs, applications can be modularized and can also include third-party libraries. DLLs promote code reuse and reduce the load time of the program because they are loaded into memory when requested.

Every DLL has a preferred base address, which is the memory address where the module should be mapped into the process' address space (virtual memory)by the operating system.

If two DLLs have the same preferred base address, when the OS loads them into memory, a collision occurs as...

OS optimization


Citrix XenApp runs on Windows 2008 R2. It's possible to apply some changes to the OS configuration to increase the overall performances of the server.

A document including all the suggested modifications has been published by Citrix (http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX131577). In the next section I'm listing, in my opinion, the most important ones.

All the servers

The following modifications apply to all the session-host servers in your farm:

Paging system components

You can prevent system components to be paged to disk with the following registry key:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory ManagementDisablePagingExecutive = dword:00000001

Power saving

Select the maximum performance scheme in both your server BIOS and in Windows Power Plan.

Worker threads

You can increase the number of threads Windows uses for read-ahead and write-behind requests, improving I/O performance:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\ExecutiveAdditionalCriticalWorkerThreads...

Worker groups


Worker groups are a collection of XenApp servers.

A worker group can contain any number of servers from the same farm it belongs to. It can also be empty. A server can belong to different worker groups.

With worker groups you can:

  • Publish an application to a group of servers and decide how to balance incoming requests among them

  • Filter Citrix policies so their settings are applied only to specific servers

  • Assign the same load evaluator to a group of servers

Creating a worker group

To create a worker group, right-click on the Worker Groups node in Citrix AppCenter, and select Create worker group.

You need to give a name to the new worker group, an optional description, and select the source of the servers:

  • Active Directory Containers

  • Active Directory Server Groups

  • Farm Servers

A worker group can either be static or dynamic. If you choose Farm Servers, you can manually add one or more servers to your farm. Choosing an Active Directory option instead lets you "link" the worker group to an...

Load evaluators


You learned that during the resolution process, the data collector chooses the least loaded server to launch the requested application. How can it determine the load level for each server?

XenApp calculates the load on a server using load evaluators. Each server must have one and only one load evaluator assigned to it. You can also attach a load evaluator to a single application.

Note

If you assign a load evaluator to both a server and an application on it, XenApp will choose the evaluator that reports the highest load.

Each load evaluator contains one or more rules. A rule defines an operational range for the server or the published application. When any rule reports full load or exceeds its threshold, XenApp considers the server unavailable and removes it from the list of balanced servers. When all the rules return values below the configured thresholds, the server is added to the list again.

Load rules

A load evaluator can contain one or more of the following rules:

Rule name...

Preferential Load Balancing


With load evaluators, you can change how XenApp evaluates the load of servers or applications. Load evaluator rules are based on performance indicators (CPU, memory, paging, and so on), not on the importance of your users.

Using Preferential Load Balancing, you can assign importance levels (Low, Normal, or High) to users and applications. Users or applications with higher importance level receive more computing resources.

Note

Preferential Load Balancing is a feature available only with a Platinum license

Preferential Load Balancing calculates the resource allotment for each session, considering both user and application importance levels.

Enabling Preferential Load Balancing

To use Preferential Load Balancing, you first need to enable the feature with a server policy:

Enabling Preferential Load Balancing

Then, you can change your users' importance with the creation of different user policies:

Assigning High importance with user policy

Finally, you can change the importance...

Summary


In this chapter you learned how to monitor your XenApp infrastructure and the most important indicators that may warn you about overloaded servers.

With two XenApp features (CPU Utilization Management and Memory Optimization) you can optimize the usage of CPU and RAM, while changing some Windows settings you can optimize the OS for hosting ICA sessions.

Using Worker groups, Load evaluators and Preferential Load Balancing you can also improve how applications and sessions are balanced on your servers, with the ability to configure different importance levels for users and applications.

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Key benefits

  • Design a scalable XenApp infrastructure
  • Monitor and optimize server performance
  • Improve end user experience
  • Tune the farm for WAN connections
  • Real world examples, ready-to-use suggestions, and best practices

Description

Citrix XenApp is an application virtualization product that allows users to connect to their corporate applications from any device. XenApp can host applications on central servers and allows users to interact with them remotely or stream and deliver them to user devices for local execution. Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials is a practical guide that provides you guidelines, best practices, and real world examples that will help you to improve the performance of your farm, identifying and solving possible bottlenecks and using advanced features including the new features provided by XenApp 6.5. Citrix XenApp is widely used to deliver enterprise applications to end users. This book covers the whole process of optimizing a XenApp farm, starting from the design phase all the way to tuning for remote users and connecting via geographic links. With your farm in production, you will understand what to monitor and how to optimize your farm, as well as how to use an open-source tool, WANem, to test the applications' behavior with different link conditions. You will also learn which settings and features XenApp offers to optimize CPU and memory utilization. This book will help you to prevent or solve performance problems and make your users happy working with published applications.

Who is this book for?

Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials is intended for IT architects and system administrators who work with Citrix XenApp and who need an agile, practical guide to tune and optimize the performance.

What you will learn

  • Learn the key components of a XenApp farm and how they work
  • Design considerations and tips that make a farm scalable
  • Understand counters and tools for health and performance monitoring
  • Discover all about CPU optimization and memory utilisation
  • Learn how to improve the load-balancing and how to handle incoming connections
  • Make, measure, and speed-up the logon process
  • Master the new XenApp 6.5 features for session pre-launch, such as sharing and lingering
  • Learn how to improve the end user experience
  • Understand how to modify Windows and Citrix session settings
  • Find out about HDX and its usage to deliver multimedia applications
  • Stimulate different links with WANem

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Aug 19, 2013
Length: 126 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782170440
Vendor :
Citrix

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Product Details

Publication date : Aug 19, 2013
Length: 126 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782170440
Vendor :
Citrix

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Table of Contents

5 Chapters
Designing a Scalable XenApp Infrastructure Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Monitoring and Improving Server Performances Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Optimizing Session Startup Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Improving End User Experience Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Optimizing for WAN Links Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.3
(3 Ratings)
5 star 33.3%
4 star 66.7%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Esther Barthel Sep 11, 2013
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
While writing my own XenApp Cookbook for Packt Publishing, I found the time to read another great XenApp book: Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials. So here's my review on the book.The book consists of 5 chapters and it starts with design guidelines to IT Architects to design a good XenApp infrastructure. The other chapters in the book focus on improvements and optimizations Administrators can implement to optimize server performance, session start-up time, end user experience and WAN connections.The first chapter focuses on the design of a XenApp infrastructure, which in my humble opinion is the most important phase for your XenApp infrastructure to determine how it will perform. A bad design decision can haunt the infrastructure during its entire lifetime.Luca has done a great job addressing the most important design decisions an Architect has to make during the design phase and sharing his vision and advice on the subject. The information he provides on the many components that build your XenApp infrastructure allows Architects to understand the role each component has and make a solid design decision. I also like the style Luca choose, to offer information and suggestions and not mandate the design.A must read chapter for XenApp infrastructure Architects!The other four chapters in the book focus on the improvements and optimizations Administrators can check and implement in a production environment. Luca start off by explaining the different monitoring tools you can use to check the performance of your XenApp servers and additional infrastructure components, like the License server and Hypervisors. I like this setup to focus first on getting the right performance counters and then look at ways to improve the performance when required. The book advices Administrators to get to know the XenApp infrastructure and help them to understand what tuning might or might not be effective by providing in-depth explanations for each optimization setting. Not only does the book focus on server performance, it will run you along all components by focusing on session performance, end user experience and WAN connections as well. This covers the entire flow from server to client and checks each contribution to the experienced performance by the end user. Each tool to check the performance is explained in detail, which makes it an even more valuable book to have when you want to focus on XenApp performance improvements.I for one have added this book to my resource library and expect to use it as a reference quite often when designing and troubleshooting XenApp infrastructures.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amazon Customer Dec 27, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Easy to understood, helpful if you have perfomance issues in your environment
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Daniele Tosatto Sep 25, 2013
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
The book consists of 5 chapters and it starts with design guidelines about XenApp infrastructure: the first chapter introduces you the main elements of a XenApp environment and help you to understand the role each component has and to make the right decision about farm sizing.Chapter 2 explains you how to monitor XenApp performances and make improvements if needed. In this chapter you will learn how to use some monitoring tools like for example Health Monitoring and Recovery and Performance monitoring counters.The last 3 chapters gives you details about session startup, user experience and WAN optimizations: starting here you can find useful tips to understand deeply the user logon process and discover potential issues and delays in order to provide the best experience to your XenApp users.This book has especially been written to provide you with all the information that you need to design a new XenApp infrastructure: for this reason, the book is written for Citrix administrators with knowledge about Citrix XenApp.The book is about 130 pages so do not expect it is a XenApp Bible!!! It is a guide that helps you make sure your XenApp farm works and performs well.So, a book well-written that point you on the right direction for designing and optimizing a XenApp infrastructure: a good read if you are considering to became a XenApp architect.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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