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Citrix XenApp 7.x Performance Essentials
Citrix XenApp 7.x Performance Essentials

Citrix XenApp 7.x Performance Essentials: Tune and optimize the performance of your farms with the new improved XenApp® architecture.

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Citrix XenApp 7.x Performance Essentials

Chapter 2. Monitor and Optimize Infrastructure – Director and EdgeSight®

The XenApp infrastructure you designed is now in production. The job of a system administrator starts now; the infrastructure must be monitored and maintained. In addition, problems that were unpredictable in the design phase might appear or new business requirements might arise, increasing the load of your site.

In this chapter, you'll learn about the following topics:

  • Performance counters available for the different components of your architecture
  • Using Citrix cmdlets for Microsoft PowerShell
  • Features offered by the new Citrix Director to monitor and troubleshoot
  • Optimizing your worker servers and load balancing the users among them

Citrix® performance monitoring counters

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

It's difficult to define which values are good for the counters in advance; this usually depends on the size of the infrastructure, the number of connected users, and so on. A better approach is to record the values during normal conditions (baselining) and compare the actual values with the baseline.

Citrix performance counters are grouped into six sections. In the next section, you will find descriptions of the most significant counters.

Citrix® Broker Agent

The following counters are available on desktops and servers where Citrix Delivery Agent is installed:

Counter name

Description

Average Message Payload To Broker Asynchronous/Synchronous

The average size of asynchronous and synchronous...

Monitoring using Microsoft PowerShell

XenApp provides an SDK based on Microsoft Windows PowerShell Version 3.0.

Using Citrix cmdlets and snap-ins, you can perform the same tasks as you would with the management console (Citrix Studio). Moreover, you can also write PowerShell scripts that retrieve performance or health data from your Citrix infrastructure to integrate with your external monitoring tool.

For example, I used PowerShell scripts to monitor XenApp installations with Nagios, a widely-used open source monitoring tool.

Note

The PowerShell SDK is compatible only with XenDesktop 5.0 or later. Snap-in names end with V1 or V2; they denote the following versions:

  • V1 is for XenDesktop 5
  • V2 is for XenDesktop 7 or later and for XenApp 7.5

In Chapter 1, Designing the New FlexCast® Management Architecture, you learned the following command to import all the Citrix plugins:

PS C:\> asnp Citrix*

This command must be at the top of every script that uses Citrix commands.

In the following sections...

Citrix® Director

With XenApp 7.5, Citrix unified all the monitoring and troubleshooting tools in a single product called the Citrix Director.

Director is a web-based tool that enables system administrators to perform the following tasks:

  • Monitor a XenApp or XenDesktop environment
  • Troubleshoot issues
  • Perform support tasks for end users

System requirements

Director requires 50 MB of disk space, Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5, and IIS (Internet Information Services) 7.0 with ASP.NET 2.0.

The minimum hardware requirements are as follows:

  • A CPU with four cores
  • 4 GB of RAM memory


Director supports the Windows 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, Windows 2012, and Windows 2012 R2 operating systems.

Note

Director can be accessed using Internet Explorer 9 or later, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.

The latest release of Citrix Director is not compatible with XenApp deployments earlier than Version 7.5 or XenDesktop deployments earlier than Version 7.

Installation

Director can be installed on one of the Delivery...

The Monitor Service Open Data API

In addition to using the Citrix Director console, historical data is available by querying the Monitor Service using the Open Data (OData) protocol (http://www.odata.org).

Using the OData API, you can get information about objects such as hypervisors, machines, desktop groups, users, sessions, and connections.

The following two endpoints are exposed by the Delivery Controller server:

  • The Methods endpoint (used by the Director): http://<dc-server>/Citrix/Monitor/OData/v1/Methods
  • The Data endpoint (with read-only access and support for the OData query language): http://<dc-server>/Citrix/Monitor/OData/v1/Data

Before being able to retrieve the data, you must authenticate with a valid account. The data you can access is determined by XenApp roles and permissions.

Using Excel PowerPivot

PowerPivot is a free plugin for Excel; you can download it from Microsoft's website.

After having installed it, open Excel and click on the PowerPivot tab, and then...

Optimizing the infrastructure

With the help of the monitoring tools previously listed, a system administrator can quickly detect performance issues or infrastructure problems. In this section, I will explain some advanced features and configurations that can be used to resolve these issues and optimize the overall performance.

CPU and memory optimizations

Worker servers can host many concurrent user sessions and applications. These sessions typically consume CPU and memory resources.

A critical aspect is how the operating system distributes the resources across the different sessions. For example, consider a user who is using a spreadsheet to perform complex financial calculations; his session can consume most of the CPU resources available on the server, potentially slowing down the work of other connected users.

XenApp 6.5 offered an internal feature named CPU Utilization Management to optimize CPU allocation. With XenApp 7.5, this feature is no longer available because the latest versions...

Citrix® performance monitoring counters


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

It's difficult to define which values are good for the counters in advance; this usually depends on the size of the infrastructure, the number of connected users, and so on. A better approach is to record the values during normal conditions (baselining) and compare the actual values with the baseline.

Citrix performance counters are grouped into six sections. In the next section, you will find descriptions of the most significant counters.

Citrix® Broker Agent

The following counters are available on desktops and servers where Citrix Delivery Agent is installed:

Counter name

Description

Average Message Payload To Broker Asynchronous/Synchronous

The average size of asynchronous and synchronous messages sent...

Monitoring using Microsoft PowerShell


XenApp provides an SDK based on Microsoft Windows PowerShell Version 3.0.

Using Citrix cmdlets and snap-ins, you can perform the same tasks as you would with the management console (Citrix Studio). Moreover, you can also write PowerShell scripts that retrieve performance or health data from your Citrix infrastructure to integrate with your external monitoring tool.

For example, I used PowerShell scripts to monitor XenApp installations with Nagios, a widely-used open source monitoring tool.

Note

The PowerShell SDK is compatible only with XenDesktop 5.0 or later. Snap-in names end with V1 or V2; they denote the following versions:

  • V1 is for XenDesktop 5

  • V2 is for XenDesktop 7 or later and for XenApp 7.5

In Chapter 1, Designing the New FlexCast® Management Architecture, you learned the following command to import all the Citrix plugins:

PS C:\> asnp Citrix*

This command must be at the top of every script that uses Citrix commands.

In the following sections...

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Description

If you are an IT architect or system administrator who works with Citrix® XenApp® and need an agile, practical guide to tune and optimize the performance of your XenApp® architecture, this is the book for you. Citrix®, Citrix Systems®, XenApp®, XenDesktop® and CloudPortal™ are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

What you will learn

  • Design a new infrastructure based on the FlexCast® Management Architecture
  • Monitor the infrastructure to identify bottlenecks
  • Load balance your applications
  • Use of WANem to simulate and test the performance of applications over a geographic link
  • Optimize the end user experience using the EdgeSight® user experience monitoring tool
  • Improve the performance of multimedia applications with Citrix® HDX™
  • Take advantage of the new features of XenApp® 7.x for mobile and remote users

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Aug 18, 2014
Length: 120 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782176121
Vendor :
Citrix

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Product Details

Publication date : Aug 18, 2014
Length: 120 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782176121
Vendor :
Citrix

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Table of Contents

5 Chapters
1. Designing the New FlexCast® Management Architecture Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Monitor and Optimize Infrastructure – Director and EdgeSight® Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Monitor and Optimize End User Experience Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Publishing Applications through WAN Links Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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James Nov 07, 2014
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This is an excellent guide to follow. I have come across technical people whom claim to be in the business for some many years, yet they simply apply best practices from where ever they can find them on the internet. They apply them without testing or considering what it does for them.Well this book breaks it down and gives you an in depth understanding of the settings and its application so that you make the best judgement call for your environment. I have gotten alot from this book. If you are implementing or supporting a Xenapp site, this is a companion to the other Xenapp books from Packt.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Andrew Moss Oct 03, 2014
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This is an excellent book for all well-rounded Citrix professionals.The book introduces new concepts for XenApp 7.x and maintains an excellent level of detail whilst at the same time not getting bogged down in too much low level technicalities. Its a lightweight read and an excellent reference book - highly recommended.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Dominic Romero Nov 04, 2014
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This is a great book for the intermediate user. It assumes you know what you are doing and builds on the core principles. This is a a great book at a great price. I will definitely look for other titles by this author.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Curran Nov 07, 2014
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If you are a system administrator, consultant or even a novice this book will give you a detailed insight into the new features in this version. It also coverst how you can apply the technology in the real world. The book clearly discusses the new FMA architecture and how Citrix have moved away from the soon to be redundant IMA architecture.I felt that the book not just gave an insight into the new technology but also looked at ways of tweaking the architecture for better performance by using real world examples and recommending products to monitor the environment for potential bottle necks.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Littlejohn Sep 26, 2014
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Really enjoyed reading this book. Definitely a must read for anyone that wants to get a better understanding of XenApp 7.5. I would highly recommend this book!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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