Citrix XenApp on VMware, VMworld Europe session AP08

This session AP08 was hosted by Michel Bond and Holger Temme.

Why clients run XenApp virtual:

• Consolidation
• 32-bit and x64 bit XenApp VM’s can coexist
  no pressure to move to x64bit
• better management flexibility & isolation
  templates/drs etc.
• common advantages that come with the VMware platform
• High availability and DR

Some caveats:

• Get your expectations right do not compare apples and oranges
• Always do your own tests, real life workloads vary drastically so do your test yourself with your specific application set in order to determine the maximum users you can run on a virtual XenApp. Do not rely only on benchmarks you will find out on the internet because most of them are based just office as an app and infrastructures that are not current anymore (old version of VI3 i.e).
• P2V works fine for a lot of workloads but is a NOGO for Terminal Services and Citrix XenApp. So using XenApp in a virtual environment means doing a fresh install.
• Pitfall: insufficient testing, also keep in mind hardware assist possibilities
• Do not mix other types of workloads (AD/file-print) with XenApp because it can seriously degrade your performance (number of users per host), create a dedicated resource pool and use dedicated hosts to run your XenApp workloads

Conclusion: Running XenApp virtual can really be cost-saving, with running it virtual you can even with 32-bit versions of XenApp fully use all hardware capabilities even beyond the bare-metal memory maximum of 4GB by using multiple smaller XenApp VM’s on a Single Hardware box.