Citrix Cloud Scaling – Part 3

Posted in : Azure, Citrix, Citrix Cloud, Virtual Apps and Desktops, Virtual Workspace, WEM By Jonas Agblad Translate with Google ⟶

2 years ago

To be able to scale has never been this important, when the load is situated in the cloud the cost savings is substantial and to be perfectly honest, its about time we use what we need, not more, not less, just the right amount!

When facing important questions like carbon footprint and what you can do about it, its really really hard and expensive if you have your own Datacenter. Fortunately Microsoft (among others) have set the bar really high in making a  a positive change for the environment, witch make the change to Cloud easier than ever. But for this to be a reality for you, it needs to be cost effective and worth your while.

At Xenit we have built a Service based on moving your workplace to the cloud called Virtual Workspace, where we, at Xenit, take care of the infrastructure, making sure it’s up to date, keep it Secured and at the same time user-friendly for the end-users. This is possible due to the uniquely high competence in this specific area, and this is our way to best utilize our knowledge!

My series of blogposts will have bits and pieces from this service, I hope  you find them helpful!

Part 1 (Load-based & Logon-storm)
Part 2 (Dynamic Session Timeout)
Part 3 (WEM)

Citrix Workspace Environment Manager

This is part 3 in my series and this tip is to make sure you have a greater density on each server, if you have Citrix WEM there are som settings that should be default. Lets see what WEM has to offer.

Tip 3: WEM – Get a higher density

Now when we have a good scaling strategy for the servers in azure its time to shave some cost by looking at the density of the servers.

It exists crazy amount of applications we use and need that does not use the resources efficiently, it depends on various reasons like really old applications we cannot get rid of because of specific adaptation of the applications when it was implemented, or it leaks memory, allocate crazy amount of CPU even when not used, the list can be made long and I think you get my point and can relate.

There is an part of WEM that I think works really well and its the part that intelligently monitor your servers, users and application behavior and act to release resources that is not utilized. Lets have a look!

CPU Spike Protection

This protects your targets from CPU spikes that comes from applications or background processes that currently isn’t in dire need of all the CPU. Spike protection use the windows process priority-tool to change the priority of the process taking all the CPU to a lower priority, freeing up the CPU for the application you actually use. This is an elegant way of freeing up the CPU in contrast to the CPU clamping technology you should avoid. And as you can see, WEM offers a really fast automated default on switch, I recommend to start with that to begin with and go back when you want to tune it even more with the advanced settings.

Memory Management

I like this one particularly much because, in my experience, in the past, when you run out of memory, there was only one effective way of getting it back, reboot the machine. And when we speak of consumption its only gone up, Google Chrome for example uses a lot of RAM, even when the user is idle. Some applications even reserver a % of the total amount of RAM, with is crazy in a multiuser environment. What kind of application need 50 GB of RAM?

Memory Management check the users idle time, when a users has been idle for a set value of time, it will take back that reserved memory for other to use, this is a really nice combination with CPU spike protection. As soon as the user gets active again they memory needed will be restored. The same applies here, you can easily just activate it and put in on default values, it works great with that, get back here when you want to tune it even more.

These 2 settings i WEM can optimize your server making 30% more space for new users, that is a substantial number and definitely something you just should activate!

This conclude the final part of my series of scaling using Citrix Cloud Autoscale and WEM, I hope you learned one or more tricks and please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or thoughts. Since your time is valuable, and you may not have time to figure out how to migrate to the cloud, take a look at our services.

Tags : Azure, Citrix, Citrix Cloud, Virtual Workspace, WEM