Xenserver: fast-clone a VM 120 times in 90 seconds
I’ve been working on Project VRC lately and in this role I’ve had the opportunity to work with different hypervisors. In my quest to conquer Xenserver I ran into a couple of challenges and I would like to share these with my readers (as I learned it the hard way, why not make it easier for you).
One of the things I needed to figure out was how to clone a VM multiple times. With Xenserver, there are a couple of options to clone a VM. From XenCenter you can right-click a VM and choose: Copy VM…
Project VRC: phase 3 – a must read!
Finally we’ve completed phase 3 of Project VRC. For the past months we’ve worked very hard and performed a lot of tests to compare VDI workloads and the results are very interesting, to say the least. If you’re interested in VDI, Windows 7 (on vSphere) and IOPS you really should read this whitepaper!
This whitepaper is focused on VDI; Windows XP and Windows 7 are extensively compared running on vSphere. For example; the I/O behavior of Windows XP and Windows 7 is investigated in detail. By evaluating the different phases of a desktop workload, completely new insights and best practices are given.
It’s great to see what kind of impact tweaking Windows and vSphere has on IOPS and number of users you can get on a VDI-host (which will lower the cost per desktop).
Also read the blogpost about the release of this VRC whitepaper.
VRC: Hyper-V 2008R2, vSphere 4, XenServer 5.5 on Intel ‘Nehalem’ Xeon 5500
The “Project Virtual Reality Check” team just released a new whitepaper: “Hyper-V 2008R2, vSphere 4, XenServer 5.5 on Intel ‘Nehalem’ Xeon 5500“.
“If you are looking for an independent advise and a ‘Reality Check’ in relation to Virtualizing Terminal Server and Desktop workloads, if you are curious about the impact of different hypervisors and the performance differences with various hardware and if you are searching for best practices for your virtual Desktops … Project VRC whitepapers are a must read!”
- Highlights, performance differences and best practice conclusions for Terminal Services workloads on:
- Bare metal Terminal Services; 2003/2008/x86/x64
- Hypervisors: Citrix XenServer 5.5, Microsoft Windows Server 2008R2 ‘Hyper-V’ and VMware vSphere 4.0
- Performance impact using different HP Proliant state-of-the-art hardware using Intel Xeon ‘Nehalem’ x5500 … Continue Reading
Citrix XenApp on VMware ESX: 1 or 2 vCPU?
In the past I’ve published two articles (here and here) about best practices on running Citrix XenApp (presentation server) on VMware ESX. It were all best practices gathered by other people, but I agreed with a lot of the recommendations. Until recently, I did also agree on using 1 vCPU XenApp virtual machines (with less users per VM) rather than 2 vCPU XenApp virtual machines (with more users per VM). From my own experience and what I got from the community, the performance will be degraded if you use 2 vCPUs. As a mather of fact, during a session on this subject at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, this was what stated:
- Always set up your Citrix VMs with 1 vCPU
- Due to the scheduling done by VMware at the hypervisor layer you will degrade performance if you use 2 vCPUs
So having experienced it myself and read about it on the internet, there was no reason for me to try it differently on newer version of ESX. But after reading “VMware Platform Performance Index”, a benchmark performed by the guys over at Virtual Reality Check (Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp), I got confused. … Continue Reading
