How would you handle this expansion (Citrix)

iaind

iaind

iaind

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Okeydoke I'll keep this brief, looking for a few opinions.

Current environment is about 400 users, XenApp 4.5 on 2003 x86 Enterprise - 8 servers so 50 users per host. Only apps are office (2003 currently) and a web based CRM.

Hardware is Dell M610 blades, 2 x Xeon Quads and 12gb RAM. 6 slots avaliable in the bladecenter.

We're expecting the user count to go from 400 to somewhere between 800 and 1500 pretty quickly (rollout over about 2 months) so I'm beginning to plan how to handle it. What would you go for, and why?

- Max out the current blade chassis with the current image, hope for the best
- As above but go for XenApp 6 to improve density with native 64 bit
- Stick with physical blades for either of the above, but get another bladecenter, this would mean expanding into a second rack in our colocated datacenter
- Virtualise the existing build, aim to get about 200 users per host by running 8VMs on each with a RAM upgrade in each.
- As above, but migrate to XA5 or 6 - to get something more up to date, although not as proven for us

Am at the very early stages of planning at the moment, but how would you handle it?
 
No benefit really, the build is so straight forward, its just Office really!

The sites are connected by 1mb/2mb MPLS links to the datacenter and will be running thin clients, most likely Wyse C10LEs

FYI, App streaming has been around since 4.5 :)
 
OK no prob :D

Do you have any perf metrics to base any upgrade on? As in, do you know if the current boxes are max'd out?

I'd be tempted to look at virtualising with XA6
 
I did some performance evaluation a little while ago - 50 users per blade is about the maximum with a decent user experience, although they will handle about 70

I've got a trial of XenServer enterprise going on one of them with 3 VMs on it (still only got 12gb) - which are running off provisioning services, which I'm really keen on.

I'm not so sure about going for 6, it's still quite new and I cant risk any instability or bugs
 
i don't work directly with citrix, im a security guy, but one of our server guys was giving me an overview of our citrix environment just the other day since i'm new to the company.

if memory serves they are running a blade environment. each blade has dual quad cpu (16 cores incl ht), 16gb memory, and all storage is backed off to a san. each blade is running xenserver, and each blade provides 4 vm's. each vm is running 2003 server with xenapp5 on top. i think he said each vm provides service for approximately 25 users, so 100 total per blade. i think the upgrade path is to increase the memory on each blade (probably double it) and then upgrade to 2008r2 with xenapp6 on top.

our environment is almost exclusively wyse terminal based (several thousand) over an mpls wan (45meg backbone, up to 2mb to each site i think). we also have cag for roaming users.

it 'just works', and does a bloody good job of it too!

hope this helps! :)
 
i've always liked the concept of citrix, there was an implementation at my previous place but it was far from optimal. this new place really has their **** together. if you have any questions, i can try and get them answered for you - the server guys are all pretty proud of their implementation since it was all designed in-house with no consultancy! (not that they like to rub it in your face or anything...!)
 
If I think of anything, I'll let you know - really just good to get some real world experience.

I've done tons with citrix and wyse, just never on this scale with such massive expansion
 
Ok know I'm a bit late to the party but I'd suggest

Virtualise your Citrix build, drop it down to 2003 Std or 2008 (not r2) as you don't need to address more than 4GB of ram and you don't want 64bit as it can cause compatibility issues particularly around drivers and some apps and Std is a lot cheaper than Ent.
Configure each VM with 2 CPUs and 4GB and a sensible amount of hard disk space.
Calculate your config based on 25 users per VM and make sure that you have sufficient capacity across the blades to loose 1 physical blade and still retain service.
I assume that the users have no access to write to the Citrix server so you can use local storage or SAN based storage.
Deploy 4 VMs per blade and scale out as you need additional capacity.
 
Don't worry, this isn't the sort of thing you jump into overnight :)

That's pretty much the plan at the moment, I'm going to start looking at XA5 but in reality I'll probably stick with 4.5 for now.

I'm also going to look more at provisioning services. I'll probably get 2 small 1u servers with 4 15k sas drives in raid10 or a few SSDs in a mirror. 16gb RAM for the cache and the provisioned servers should fly. Disk cache could either go on the local disks in the blades or on a SAN volume, probably the former
 
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