Sizing

When sizing a new environment it is tempting to use averages. It seems the logical thing to do. But it also guarantees a bad user experience. Example: Sizing an RDS or XenApp Farm Let’s say you’re tasked with building a new Citrix XenApp farm. Being a diligent IT person you set up a pilot: one or two machines with all the right software and settings. Then you carefully select a group of pilot users in such a way that they represent the organization’s employee types statistically correctly. Then you let them work on the new platform, ironing out bugs and such. At the end of that period, you have a great new platform. But there is one big question left: how many servers to buy?!

This is the third article in a multi-part series about building and maintaining an inexpensive scalable platform for VDI in enterprise environments. Previously in this Series In the last article I explained that shared storage should be avoided, for two reasons: it is (very) expensive, and you, the VDI guy, are not in control. The storage guys are.

Do you know the maximum number of users each of your terminal servers can host with acceptable performance? You may have found out the hard way how many are too many - but how many are just right? Farm sizing and server capacity planning are typical tasks for consultants who often have a hard time fighting the peculiarities of perfmon and logman trying to get the data they need for their calculations. It can be so much easier at no additional cost. The 60-day Enterprise Trial version of Splunk in conjunction with an evaluation license of uberAgent give all the information you need in much less time. Here is how.

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous articles in this series we saw how to calculate a farm’s capacity and then how to determine its load. With that information and knowledge of our methodology we can go about calculating the capacity of the new farm, in other words doing the actual sizing. Which is dead simple, by the way.

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous part of this series we saw how to determine the capacity of a server farm. This time we will look at how that capacity is utilized, in other words at farm load. As before we will do that for the four main components of a XenApp server separately: CPU, memory, storage and network.

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. As we have seen in part 1 of this series, when sizing a new farm the first thing we need to know is the capacity of the existing farm. Armed with data on capacity and additionally load, we can easily calculate the capacity of a new farm. In this article I describe how to determine capacity of the four relevant hardware components of a XenApp server: CPU, memory, storage and network.

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. One of the first things you need to do after starting a XenApp farm upgrade project is to answer the obvious question from management: how much will it cost? In order to be able to answer, you need to have a good understanding of the resources required. In other words, you need to size the farm.