[THIN] Re: Citrix on VMWare

Soooo...you're saying that pig of a Visual FoxPro based app that regularly 
pegs the processor and that *mumble* client of mine runs isn't going to 
benefit by virtualization? o_0

Actually, I jest, partially. I am in the middle of deploying some Citrix 
servers on Microsoft Virtual Server '05, but the major reason is business 
continuity, not performance. The client is willing to take a tradeoff on 
hardware and performance vs. recoverability and management for the following 
reasons:

- System updates for the app come out fairly often, and the system needs a 
rapid rollback strategy
- Client is in the middle of an acquisition phase and needs to be able to 
deploy more resources quickly
- Client loves having machines that can be clones, backed up, rolled back, 
and versioned according to those needs
- Client is willing to oversubscribe on hardware in order to have 
scalability, reliability and redundancy
- Client is planning on having a copy of their VM image taken to a remote 
datacenter for disaster recovery purposes

The basic strategy and argument for having app servers on virtual machines 
is to overspend on hardware capacity by 20-40% in order to have rapid 
failover, fail-back and recovery. We've demonstrated being able to roll back 
to a previous version of the Virtual Hard Disk file via Volume Shadow Copy 
in a case where the system becomes compromised by spyware or a bad 
application update, and that has become a compelling business case for 
virtualization.

On 5/9/05, Ron Oglesby <roglesby@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Well it depends.
> 
> I run a one-off server build on it with low utilization right now. I
> also run my prod WI/CSG on it.
> 
> Now I just did a presentation on this at Briforum and the real key is
> what your bottleneck is on Phys machines. If you run into virtual
> address space limitations on the OS but have very low Proc and mem
> utilization you probably have a real good fit. Now if you run into
> limitations of physical resources, those limitations will show up a
> little earlier in a VM environment.
> 
> You have to remember the idea, the processor time is being scheduled,
> and while it is a very light overhead it is still an overhead.
> Now the next thing I can say is people running into OS limits have great
> success, People with crappy apps (Ie lots of ring 0 system calls,
> context switches etc) can experience a performance reduction. I had one
> client that with everything set per VMware recommendations and pegging
> VMs to single procs still lost 40% of their users per proc when compared
> to physical machines. This was a result of the applications being run.
> 
> If you have really well behaved/written apps you can have better
> results.
> 
> Now, once you get beyond those initial performance things there are
> other reasons for deploying Citrix (or any server) on VM architecture,
> but that's another thread.
> 
> Ron
> 
> Ron Oglesby
> Director of Technical Architecture
> 
> RapidApp, Chicago
> Office: 312 372 7188
> Mobile: 815 325 7618
> email: roglesby@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of msemon@xxxxxxx
> Sent: Friday, May 06, 2005 10:39 AM
> To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [THIN] Re: Citrix on VMWare
> 
> I am not sure I would put this on your primary production farm. We saw
> some
> performance issues with a client who had installed on primary production
> farm. You might look at secondary silo. Also, check out Ron's book on
> VMWare ESX server which should be in book stores any day.
> 
> Mike
> 
> Original Message:
> -----------------
> From: Bermuda Boy phits_right@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 10:52:21 -0300
> To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [THIN] Citrix on VMWare
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I was wondering whether anybody had performed the "daunting?" task of
> installing any of the Metaframe suite on VMWare? I was thinking of
> putting
> CSG and/or the Web Interface server in a virtualized environment.
> 
> Your feed back is encouraged :-)
> 
> Bermuda Boy
> 
> Sean B. McLaughlin esq.
> 
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