A Short Guide to Virtualizing Citrix on VMware ESX 3
I found this post recently on Brian Madden's web site discussing some very specific steps to tune your ESX server for hosting Citrix servers. Now, I personally don't often recommend the virtualization of Citrix or Terminal Servers for performance reasons, but for disaster and rapid recovery purposes, I think its always a good idea to have one instance residing on your ESX infrastructure. Doubly so if you're replicating those VM's over to a remote site for DR.
Some of the interesting and very specific recommendations I saw in this piece are...
sched.mem.pshare.enableEnables memory sharing for a selected virtual machine. This boolean value defaults to True. If you set it to False for a virtual machine, memory sharing is turned off. This can be a way to switch off memory sharing without modifying the host ESX.
das.defaultfailoverhostIf this is set, VMware HA will first try to fail over Virtual Machines to the host specified by this option. This is useful if you want to utilize one host as a spare failover host. It is not usually recommended, however, because VMware HA tries to utilize all available spare capacity among all hosts in the cluster. If the specified host does not have enough spare capacity, VMware HA tries to fail over the virtual machine to any other host in the cluster that has enough capacity.
This is useful in case you modify the ESX Host settings on some of your ESX Hosts and want to make sure your Terminal and Citrix Servers failover to the desired and configured host.
sched.cpu.htsharingAny (default) – The virtual CPUs of this virtual machine can freely share cores with other virtual CPUs of this or other virtual machines.
None – The virtual CPUs of this virtual machine have exclusive use of a processor core whenever they are scheduled to it. The other hyperthread of the core is halted while this virtual machine is using the core.
Internal – On a virtual machine with exactly two virtual processors, the two virtual processors are allowed to share one physical core (at the discretion of the ESX Server scheduler), but this virtual machine never shares a core with any other virtual.
Check out the full piece on Madden's site at:
http://www.brianmadden.com/content/article/A-short-guide-to-virtualizing-Presentation-and-Terminal-servers-on-VMware-ESX-3
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