[THIN] Re: biggest Citrix farm
- From: "Braebaum, Neil" <Neil.Braebaum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 10:56:02 -0000
Comments inline...
> -----Original Message-----
> From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Barry Flanagan
> Sent: 26 February 2004 22:54
> 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.
Sounds ideal.
Problem being that for smaller installations, the costs aren't likely
acceptable.
CSTK is OK for general expectations and extrpolation, and can be
tweaked, but the Mercury stuff sounds much more representative.
Going back some years, I worked with a a consultant on stress tests for
large, back-end Unix kit. That worked largely by recording typical
activity - although you could programmtically parameterise (IIRC), and
we simulated user count in the hundreds (perhaps approaching around
400).
I was very impressed at the time - the software, and tweaking all went
to provide a representative test, and the use of it was great - you
could take a look at sessions, and if there was a problem (say the
timing had gone out, or something) easily reset - in general, it was
very robust, even for the big numbers.
The consultant and his company specialised in this sort of thing can't
remember the names, or software, now, though - it was probably around 10
years ago :-(
> 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.
One thing I was curious about, with these sort of developments - more
improvements in the code, rather than additional features - are these
sort of improvements only turned on with FR license activation? Or
merely installation of the appropriate service pack? Because surely,
then, the code is the same, and the licensing activation just turns on
"features"?
Neil
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