[THIN] Re: Virtualizing Citrix

TS hosted under VMware is certainly doable, however even if you can replace 7 physical boxes with one beefy ESX box, for fault tolerance purposes you should certainly consider getting more than just one ESX box, and it's worthwhile investment with multiple ESX servers to get Virtual Infrastructure as well.

Hardware still fails, and if your one beefy box goes offline taking all 7 virtual servers down, you're dead in the water. With Virtual Infrastructure, and additional ESX systems, those 7 virtual servers could auto fail over to other online ESX servers while you repair your downed hardware.

We support about 350 staff on virtualized win2k3 citrix 4.0 systems with vmware 3.5. We host these on HP Proliant BL465c G1 blades, with 4 cpus, and 16gb. At this point we're running about 10 virtual TS servers per ESX host in a 4 server vmware HA cluster, we've room to add more TS virtuals if needed.

Depending on application set, your mileage may vary.

On another note, although our virtualized TS systems have certainly served us well, changing needs in our application requirements is leading me to look more into VDI type solutions to supply our app set to our staff members. On our TS servers, our apps are fighting each other for CPU a bit too much for my liking, and we really can't silo off apps anymore than we have. So it seems to me a VDI solution where each user / app has their own isolated winxp virtual space to work from (vs a shared TS environment) may be a better fit...we'll see...just starting into the design and testing of this.

HTH

Lan

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 6:28 AM, Minero, Hector B CIV NSWCDD, K55 <hector.minero@navy.mil> wrote:

Hi all,
I see all these messages going back and forth about virtualization, but not much information on how Citrix/TS behaves in a virtualized environment.

A tech./sales person from Dell came yesterday and told me that I could probably replace 7 of my PowerEdge 2850 with one beefed up PowerEdge R900 and virtualize the 7 Citrix servers.   I find that kind of hard to believe.

Each of my 2850's can handle about 30 to 40 users concurrently.   I just don't think that an R900 could handle 200 + users with virtual Citrix servers.

Is anyone out there using VMWare to virtualize Citrix servers in a production environment? 
What kind of hardware? 
How many virtual servers per physical server? 
How many users?

I would greatly appreciate your advice as I am new to VMWare.

_______________________________
Hector Minero
NSWCDD K55