[THIN] Re: XenServer 5.0 Tools/Adobe Acrobat 8.x on a Terminal Server

It's been quite good other than this issue. Right now I would rank the
hypervisors for this task (Citrix/TS) 1. XenServer 2. Hyper-V 3. ESXi
(dedicated) 4. ESX (shared hardware with other VM's of other types).
They are all capable of the task. ESX requires some extra research and
tweaks to compete with the others though. We use VMWare a lot for
other VM's so I wouldn't have predicted this outcome. XenServer
performs well, but it's a bit rough around the edges with some
annoying bugs.
Still need to get some hard data on performance vs. the physical, but
I can tell you not 1 user has said whenever I am on VM server X (they
know which server they attach to) it stinks, but when I get on
physical server Y it works much better. I know there is a holy war
out there to virtualize Citrix or not, but I would say it's worth it
to at least try it. Same arguments about having a bunch of
underutilized physical servers in the non-TS world apply in Citrix now
that hardware is so far past the capabilities of a 32 bit Windows OS.
I also want to test a single 64 bit Terminal Server vs. multiple 32
bit VM's on same hardware, but my gut tells me it won't scale as well
because most of our apps will run 32 bit anyway.
-Matt

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 3:07 AM, Nick Smith <nick@officeanyplace.com> wrote:
> Cant help with that, but what has the performance been like on the different platforms?
>
> Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.
> - Show quoted text -
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Matt Kosht <matt.kosht@gmail.com>
> Sent: 04 March 2009 03:42
> To: thin@freelists.org <thin@freelists.org>
> Subject: [THIN] XenServer 5.0 Tools/Adobe Acrobat 8.x on a Terminal Server
>
>
> OK bear with me, this one has drove me nuts for about a month. Acrobat
> 8 runs fine on physical W2K3/PS4.0 term servers, Hyper-V VM's and
> ESXi/ESX VM's with the same specs as the physical. I have been running
> them all head to head to see which one works best for our environment.
>  On XenServer hosted VM's Acrobat 8 would lock up just opening the
> program. I tried lots of things to fix it (reinstalling it, repairing
> it, etc) I finally broke down and built a brand new clean VM on
> XenServer 5.0 so I could figure what on earth was causing this.  I did
> a straight Windows 2003R2 32 bit Standard SP2 install with the
> XenServer tools, enabled terminal services, installed Office 2003 (so
> I could see if the integrations with Acrobat worked).  I turned off
> DEP just to rule it out as well.  I installed Acrobat 8 Standard and
> it locked up as it did on my production image. The version was 8.0 at
> this point i then tested each update incrementally with the same
> result up to 8.1.3.  The only thing I could possibly think was
> different with so little installed on the VM was the XenServer tools.
> Bingo uninstalling them fixed Adobe!  Reinstalling them breaks Adobe.
> Has anyone else encountered this? Any thoughts to how to fix it would
> be mighty appreciated.
> -Matt
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