[THIN] Re: biggest Citrix farm

Barry (or anyone), you ever see anyone using NetIQ's Chariot (formerly
Ganymede Chariot) or have an opinion on it's ability to simulate a load on a
Citrix farm.  I know it has application scripts for ICA but have never heard
how good/bad it is?  Any thoughts on it?
Regards,

Tyler Kinchen


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Barry Flanagan [mailto:barry.flanagan@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 5:54 PM
> To: 'thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
> Subject: [THIN] Re: biggest Citrix farm
> 
> 
> Ron,
> I agree with your caution on how many servers to run in a farm. Every
> environment is different, and no test department can 
> completely simulate all
> the possible scenarios customers may build. For a farm that 
> large, before
> ever rolling it out I would try to simulate the environment 
> with a load
> simulation tool like Mercury Interactive's Load Runner with the Citrix
> Virtual User. For an environment that is approaching 300 or 
> more servers ,
> MI (or one of their competitors) is a worthy investment. I 
> like MI because
> you can record a user session then kick off a large quantity 
> of sessions per
> client. MI says you can simulate 100 from a beefy client test machine,
> though in my experience more than 40 is pushing it (not sure what MI
> considers beefy). Not many corporations would rollout a 
> project with 300-500
> web servers without simulating the load first. 
> If you simulate the load before you roll out, you should find any weak
> points before production. The key of course is simulating 
> what real users
> will do. MI cost a lot of cash, unfortunately. If the 
> customer already uses
> it for web simulation, adding the Citrix VU is a lot easier 
> to swallow. I
> agree that you cannot pitch a design based on test numbers 
> that may or may
> not apply to your environment. Load simulation should give 
> you a lot more
> confidence. All you have to do is convince the ones with the 
> money it is
> worth it. <g>
> 
> Those numbers you heard about test are a bit different from what my
> experience has been. I saw the test environment when they had 
> 1000 servers
> in the farm. They regularly test 500 in a farm (at least once 
> for every new
> release). They keep about 250 servers in the scalability lab 
> (test Level 2).
> 
> 
> 
> FR3 was tested with up to 800 servers in a zone. Another 
> interesting number
> was IMA start time was reduced from 8 minutes in a 250 server 
> farm (for Fr2)
> to under a minute (for Fr3). That alone should greatly 
> improve scalability.
> These numbers were presented at iForum I believe. As I 
> mentioned before,
> your mileage may vary.
> 
> 
> Thanx,
> 
> Barry Flanagan
> 
>  
> *     From: "Ron Oglesby" <roglesby@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 
> *     To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
> *     Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 14:05:19 -0600 
> In one farm... You had better retalk to Citrix consulting. The test
> engineers and Citrix CCS architects I deal with don't want to 
> sign off on
> anything larger that 400+ servers in the SAME farm. Different 
> frams in the
> same environment is different. 
> 
> Hell Test says they haven't even tested much bigger than 400
> 
> Ron Oglesby
> Senior Technical Architect
> Microsoft MVP - Windows Server
>  
> RapidApp, Chicago
> Mobile 815 325-7618
> Office 312 372-7188
> e-mail roglesby@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> 
> 
> 
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