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

Luca Dentella

€24.99

4.3 (3 Ratings)

Paperback Aug 2013 126 pages 1st Edition

Luca Dentella

€24.99

4.3 (3 Ratings)

Paperback Aug 2013 126 pages 1st Edition

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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...

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...

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

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Esther Barthel Sep 11, 2013

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 Customer Dec 27, 2016

Easy to understood, helpful if you have perfomance issues in your environment

Daniele Tosatto Sep 25, 2013

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.

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

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