Persistence and Persistent connections: Unless you configure persistence, a load balancing stateless protocol, such as HTTP, disrupts the maintenance of state information about client connections. Different transmissions from the same client might be directed to different servers even though all of the transmissions are part of the same session. You must configure persistence on a load balancing virtual server that handles certain types of Web applications, such as shopping cart applications.
In a load balancing configuration, you assign weights to services to indicate the percentage of traffic that should be sent to each service. Services with higher weights can handle more requests; services with lower weights can handle fewer requests. Assigning weights to services allows the NetScaler appliance to determine how much traffic each load balanced server can handle, and therefore more effectively balance load.
Note: If you use a load balancing method that supports weighting of services (for example, the round robin method), you can assign a weight to the service.
XenApp
XenApp Design Principles
XA_-_Planning_Guide_-_Virtualization_Best_Practices
XA6(6.X) Windows Server 2008 R2 optimization Guide
Application Deployment XA or XD
XenApp 6.x Planning Guide Virtualization Best Practices
XenApp and XenDesktop Best Practices
XenDesktop
Citrix XenDesktop 7.1 on Microsoft Hyper-V Server® 2012 High-Level Design
Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook XenDesktop 7.x
Use Latest CPU Technology when installing citrix on vmware:
When possible, deploy vSphere on CPUs that support second generation CPU virtualization. This includes processors from both AMD and Intel. Second generation CPU virtualization not only supports hardware assisted CPU virtualization (Intel VT-x and AMD AMD-V), but also introduces the hardware assisted memory management unit (MMU). AMD refers to this technology as rapid virtualization indexing (RVI) or nested page tables (NPT). On Intel processors this feature is called extended page tables (EPT).
IMA Service and Citrix SMA Service fail to start and MFCOM Service is unresponsive, when the state of the status is Starting.
The reason in the Event viewer mentions that the SMA and IMA Service failed to start because a dependent Service or Service group could not be started.
When you start the MFCOM Service manually, it times out with the following error message:
“1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion”
I want to share a list of all citrix best practices documents that contain usefull information when you have to write a XenApp of XenDesktop design.
design part
best practice guide
active directory
Edoc-Recommendations for Active Directory Environments
application virtualization
virtual application management with microsoft application virtualization 4.5/4.6 and system center configuration manager 2007R2 2012 search for app-v and configmgr whitepaper
bandwidth
ctx124457 performance assessment and bandwidth analysis for delivering xendesktop to branch offices
Session sharing is a mode in which more than one published application runs within a single ICA/HDX connection. Session sharing occurs when a user has an open session and launches another application that is published on the same XenApp server; the result is that the two applications run in the same session. Session sharing is configured by default when you specify that applications appear in seamless window mode.
Inconsistent results may occur when applications are configured for different requirements, such as encryption and color depth.
One of the first questions when virtualizing XenApp is how many VMs to put on a server. Well, that was discussed in the Virtualize XenApp blog. Once you figure out how you plan to carve up the physical server, one of the next common questions is deciding which features of the hypervisor to enable/disable. For example, if I use XenServer, should I use the “Optimize for XenApp” setting? What about vSphere’s Transparent Page Sharing feature?
Here is a pretty common question… I want to virtualize my XenApp servers, how should I carve the physical server up? Should I use a bunch of small VMs or a few massive VMs?
First, you have to look at a few decision points:
OS Scalability: This is more of an issue in Windows 2003. Operations: More VMs means more to manage, unless you use a single image management solution like Provisioning Services.
SpeedScreen Folder
The SpeedScreen folder contains a rule that enables you to remove or alter compression. When client connections are limited in bandwidth, downloading images without compression can be slow.
Image Acceleration Using Lossy Compression
This rule defines ways in which images can be compressed to improve the responsiveness of graphics-intensive applications:
Normal lossy compression Progressive display compression Heavyweight compression If your server farm includes servers running different releases of XenApp, you may not be able to apply all of these image acceleration techniques to all of the servers in the farm.
