Optimizing XenApp for the Virtual Data Center April 11 th, 2012 Shawn Bass Citrix CTP & Microsoft MVP Independent Consultant www.shawnbass.com @ShawnBass Jim Moyle Citrix CTP Lead European Solutions Consultant Atlantis Computing www.atlantiscomputing.com @JimMoyle 1
Citrix XenApp/RDS History Citrix XenApp/RDS pre-dates virtualization Presentation Server has been around since the 1990 s Server virtualization has only taken hold in the mid 2000 s Many existing deployments are on physical server using local disk Single XenApp instance with access to dedicated low latency disks Windows Server 2003 Very stable environment without storage issues 2
Virtualization Drivers for Citrix XenApp Why change from physical to virtual XenApp? 1. Increase server utilization and density to lower cost 2. Improve manageability (vmotion, DRS) 3. Smaller failure domain and easier maintenance 4. Simplify disaster recovery 5. Faster migration to Server 2008 R2 and XenApp 6.5 In many datacenters, virtualizing servers is the rule & physical is the exception! 3
Windows Server 2008 R2 Migration Why migrate to Server 2008 R2? 1. Give users a consistent Windows 7 look and feel 2. Citrix XenApp End of Life requires upgrade to XenApp 6.5 by July 2013 3. XenApp 6.5 only supports Server 2008 R2 Citrix Product Presentation Server 4.5 Supported OS End of Life 2003 March 2013 XenApp 5.0 2003 March 2013 XenApp 6.0 2008 R2 July 2013 XenApp 6.5 2008 R2 July 2015 By July 2013, XenApp customers must migrate to XenApp 6.5! 4
Virtualization XenApp and Storage Survey What are you plans for virtualizing XenApp? What storage do you use for your virtualized XenApp deployment? 25% Completely Virtualized Plan to Virtualize by 2013 38% 27% Other Shared NAS/SAN EMC SAN 7% 58% Don't Plan to Virtualize NetApp NAS 10% Currently Migrating to Virtualized 18% 17% Local Disk Source: registration survey Sample Size: 293 Source: registration survey Sample Size: 71 5
Virtualizing Citrix XenApp with Server 2008 R2 Virtualizing XenApp Storage Challenges Requires SAN/NAS for certain features Performance - Provisioning, Boot/Logon time and IO intensive application Shared storage lowers density and impacts performance Server 2008 R2 doubles IOPS required per VM Office 2010 Internet Explorer 8/9 Improper sizing impacts density and performance Introduces latency that affects user experience 6
Bursty Nature of Desktop IO A/V Scan Boot Read Steady State Write SCCM Update Windows Characteristics: Average I/O hides a multitude of sins Small Blocks Steady State IOPs profile 80% Write, 20% Read Highly Random I/O Storage Considerations: Aggregate and Peak I/O Boot and Logon Storms RAID Level = PENALTY! Disk Latency / Contention 7
A closer look at Windows desktop I/O 300 250 Cached Roaming 1GB Read 332 Write 314 200 IOPS 150 100 50 0 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47 49 51 53 55 57 59 61 63 65 67 69 71 73 75 Seconds read writ
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67 70 73 76 79 82 85 88 91 94 97 100 103 106 109 112 115 118 121 124 127 130 133 136 139 142 145 148 A closer look at Windows desktop I/O 600 First Roaming 1GB 500 221 Read 4218 Write 400 IOPS 300 200 100 0 Seconds read writ
Atlantis ILIO Introduction MS Office Virtualization-Aware Borderless Network Cisco Identity Services Engine Virtualized Collaborative Cisco Virtualization Workspace Experience Clients AnyConnect Cisco VXC 6215 Thin Client PC Hypervisor AnyConnect WAAS Cisco VXC 4000 PC Client Thin Client Tablet Storage IO traffic reduction with Software Processing Windows NTFS IO traffic processed locally to greatly reduce storage traffic and provide local IOPS Inline Deduplication for VDI Workloads Deduplicates Windows Image components before reaching storage 10
Virtualized XenApp with Atlantis ILIO R2 R2 R2 R2 ILIO Software in a VM Any server Any storage No changes to XenApp Atlantis ILIO for XenApp Hypervisor SAN/NAS Storage
Atlantis ILIO Optimizes Virtualized XenApp Storage Performance Faster than Physical XenApp Provisioning 53% faster provisioning Boot Time 4X faster boot time IO Intensive Applications accelerate application performance Density 16% server density improvement 10x more users on the same storage 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Atlantis ILIO for XenApp Performance (6 XenApp Instances) Storage Savings 92% reduction in storage capacity 1 0 Provisioning Time (Hours) Before Atlantis ILIO Boot Time (Minutes) After Atlantis ILIO Source: Independent Testing by Shawn Bass, CTP 12
Citrix XenApp & RDS Workload Improvements with Atlantis ILIO By Shawn Bass, CTP and Microsoft MVP bit.ly/xenapp 92% storage savings 53% faster provisioning 16% more scalability 77% faster boot time
Atlantis ILIO for XenApp Testing Objectives Background Storage impact of virtualizing XenApp overlooked Performance, scalability and density Scope Determine the impact of Atlantis ILIO on virtualized XenApp deployments: Storage Consumption Provisioning Time Boot Time Session scalability Session responsiveness
Test Environment, Configuration and Process Test Configuration Dual 6-core Xeon X5650@ 2.67Ghz (12 cores + hyperthreading = 24 cores), 96GB RAM IOMega ix4-200d 4x7200 RPM SATA Atlantis ILIO 2.2, XenApp 6.5, ESXi 5.0 12 x Win 2008 Server VMs, 2 vcpu, 8GB RAM, 16GB Page file Testing Process Response time & Density: Load Test with LoginVSI 3.5 Medium and VSiMax Scalability: iometer IO generator with 80% write, 20% read workload Sizing 15
Test Configuration Provisioning and Boot Time Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard LoginVSI applications (MS Office, Adobe ) 40GB Hard Disk thin provisioned to 19GB Atlantis ILIO performing inline block-level deduplication Provisioning Results 12 XenApp instances took 4:41:00 to clone 12 XenApp instances took 2:12:00 to clone with ILIO Boot Time Results 12 XenApp instances took 0:8:25 to boot 12 XenApp instances took 0:1:58 to boot with ILIO 16
Storage Consolidation Test Configuration 40GB Hard Disk thin provisioned to 19GB Storage Consolidation Results 12 XenApp instances took 228GB of storage capacity (19GB per instance) 12 XenApp instances took 18GB of storage capacity (1.5 GB per instance) 92% reduction in storage capacity required This means that you could put 12.5 times more XenApp instances on the same storage array 17
Response Time & Density Test Configuration LoginVSI Medium Workload VSIMax occurs at 4,000 ms Response Time results XenApp with ILIO XenApp Consistently faster response times with Atlantis ILIO (over 1000ms at times) Density Results LoginVSI reached VSIMax at 83 LoginVSI reached VSIMax at 96 with Atlantis ILIO That is a 16% density increase 18
Scale Testing of Atlantis ILIO for XenApp Scaling XenApp Workloads 80-90% write IO during stead state Write IOPS critical to scaling XenApp Latency is important to maintain user experience Atlantis ILIO Scale Test Results (iometer) Write IOPS - 60-100x increase Throughput 75x increase Latency 75x faster response time 19
Summary of Findings There are many reasons to virtualize XenApp and many deployments that are migrating to Server 2008 R2 will virtualize by 2013 Virtualizing XenApp introduces I/O constraints and potential performance and scale issues related to storage Deploying Citrix XenApp & RDS workload behind Atlantis ILIO can reduce storage requirements, improve provisioning and boot time when I/O is a limiting factor for scale. 20
Resources & Questions XenApp Resources Citrix XenApp & RDS Workload Improvements with Atlantis ILIO bit.ly/xenapp Shawn Bass Blog on XenApp End of Life bit.ly/xenappeol Jim Moyle blog on Virtualizing XenApp blog.atlantiscomputing.com VDI Resources Atlantis ILIO for VDI Solutions Brief bit.ly/iliovdi Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI bit.ly/disklessvdi Windows 7 IOPS Deep Dive Whitepaper by Jim Moyle www.atlantiscomputing.com/win7iops Twitter @ShawnBass @JimMoyle @AtlantisILIO 21