[THIN] Re: biggest Citrix farm
- From: Barry Flanagan <barry.flanagan@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 17:53:56 -0500
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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