Citrix goes virtual?

Last week Citrix anounced a new product line, the Citrix Destkop Server. They will deliver virtual desktops running on HP Blade servers with VMware ESX. This is I believe the next step Citrix is taking in the virtual world.

Last year i implemented a Metaframe XP farm at a local governement. They recently asked me to do an upgrade to the newest of newest shiny version of Citrix on their 10 server farm: PS 4.5.

There have been numerous questions about this on various forums with very few people giving an exact answer. This is how we did it...

Note that in order for your resource manager summary database to run on SQL 2005 you need to enable SQL 2000 Compatibilty.

Is iSCSI able to hold its own against Fibre channel SANs?

The answer is simple, I don't know. Each technology has its pro's and cons and over the past few months a lot of companies have been doing research and investing in such technologies. Virtual infrastructure is becoming a large part of our industry and in order to accomodate this SANs are becoming a larger and larger part as well.

Microsoft Windows has had a built in feature called prefetch for some time now and what prefetch would do was load up your most frequently used programs to memory so that they could launch faster and work more quickly. This was great, except for 1 thing. Windows operating systems prior to Windows Vista were not that aggresive in terms of how much RAM prefetch would use!

Windows Vista has changed this. Many people have asked me about this because their machines are reporting 50 or 60mb free memory. The reason for this is that Microsoft changed Prefetch to SuperFetch and made it a lot more aggresive. This actually makes a lot of sense and when I was reading the article written by the performance team about this it all clicked.

Read the performance teams on Window Superfetch and Readyboost here

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/03/29/windows-vista-superfetch-readyboost.aspx

There have been a large number of posts and questions about the /3GB switch in the boot.ini file on servers. The performance team explains exactly what this switch does with nice little diagrams of the default address space layout, etc.

Definately worth a read, especially if you have ever used this switch or been advised to do so.

Read the article at http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/03/23/memory-management-demystifying-3gb.aspx