EdgeSight for XenDesktop Best Practices

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER EdgeSight for XenDesktop EdgeSight for XenDesktop Best Practices The document provides best practices for implementing and utilizing the XenDesktop Platinum monitoring feature EdgeSight, with focus on environment specific architecture options and recommendations for monitoring, troubleshooting and analyzing virtual desktop performance.

2 Table of Contents Executive Overview... 3 Product Overview... 4 EdgeSight... 4 XenDesktop... 4 EdgeSight Architecture Considerations... 4 Basic Architecture... 4 XenDesktop Best Practices for Architecture... 5 Using EdgeSight Reports... 9 Troubleshooting Issues... 9 Monitoring Planning and Allocating Summary Appendix A - Additional Monitoring Tools & Resources Appendix B - Session Startup & Duration Acronyms Page 2

3 Executive Overview With XenDesktop 4, and the ability of FlexCast delivery technology to enable desktop virtualization for every user in the enterprise, the importance of monitoring has never been greater. In order to proactively maintain the environment, plan capacity, and quickly identify root causes of issues, XenDesktop 4 Platinum Edition offers EdgeSight monitoring capabilities that provide deep insight into real-time and historical desktop and application performance. EdgeSight not only offers insight into performance metrics provided by standard Windows tools, but also shows metrics based on what the user is actually experiencing. EdgeSight for XenDesktop can monitor Windows 7, Vista and XP desktops that are either physical or virtualized on any hypervisor. With a variety of different architecture options, EdgeSight can easily be integrated into any environment without requiring restructuring of security policies or storage configuration. EdgeSight can be used to answer a variety of questions, such as: What kind of performance are users experiencing right now? What was the state of the desktop when an issue occurred? How long are the user login times? What kind of delays are applications experiencing to the backend databases? What are the most resource-intensive or problematic applications? What applications are users installing into the environment? Do the users have enough memory/processor power/disk space? Do the remote users have acceptable performance levels? What s the overall health of the XenDesktop environment? With hundreds of customizable reports, overviews, and real-time monitoring and alerting, EdgeSight can provide information at a granular level for help desk staff and Citrix administrators or provide executives with a complete high level overview of the environment. EdgeSight for XenDesktop is a special client that has integrated features of both EdgeSight for EndPoints and EdgeSight for XenApp in order to provide the necessary visibility into the health of the virtual desktop environment. Incorporating EdgeSight into Citrix XenApp environments has historically allowed administrators to increase performance and optimize capacity, and now that same EdgeSight technology is available for Citrix XenDesktop. This document outlines architecture options and reporting best practices to ensure that implementing EdgeSight into any Citrix XenDesktop environment can provide the same performance and optimization benefits. Page 3

4 Product Overview EdgeSight The Citrix EdgeSight product line provides the real-time visibility necessary to test, deliver and monitor the performance of web, desktop and virtualized applications with the best user experience. EdgeSight manages application performance and availability where it matters most at the business user level. By providing a direct line of sight across networks, servers, databases and desktops, EdgeSight goes beyond traditional device and network monitoring tools to improve application visibility. This consolidated view of application performance as experienced by the user gives IT the necessary tool set to lower costs, reduce downtime and improve service delivery. XenDesktop Citrix XenDesktop is a desktop virtualization system that centralizes and delivers desktops as a service to users anywhere, reduces desktop total cost of ownership (TCO) up to 40 percent and improves data security by centralizing desktop lifecycle management in the datacenter. It delivers a high definition user experience over any connection, including high latency wide area networks. The open architecture of XenDesktop offers choice and flexibility of virtualization platform and end points. Unlike other desktop virtualization alternatives, it simplifies desktop management by using a single image to deliver personalized desktops to users anywhere and enables IT to manage service levels with built-in desktop performance monitoring. EdgeSight Architecture Considerations EdgeSight functions using an agent-server architecture model. Using a data-collecting agent that gathers information regarding its host s performance, EdgeSight aggregates the data along with the other agents at a single master server. This data can then be manipulated and output in many standard reports, and additional customized reports can be created using Microsoft s Report Builder. Basic Architecture ICA Client Device (Laptop/Desktop/Thin Client) EdgeSight Agent EdgeSight Agent Database XenDesktop XP/Win7 Machine EdgeSight Server EdgeSight SQL Database Figure 1: EdgeSight Architecture Page 4

5 EdgeSight is composed of two primary components (Figure 1): EdgeSight Agent: The EdgeSight Agent resides on the virtual desktop that is being monitored. The EdgeSight Agent requires a software agent and a database to store agentspecific data. The following two options are available for the agent database: o EdgeSight Agent Database: When installing the software agent a Firebird database (a lightweight relational database) is automatically installed on the local virtual desktop. o EdgeSight Agent Database Server: In some highly-specific configurations (discussed below), it may be beneficial to host the Agent Database on an external server rather than on the local virtual desktop based on the desktop storage configurations. EdgeSight Server: The EdgeSight Server aggregates all the data reported from each individual agent and collectively presents the data. The collective data requires a dedicated database known as the EdgeSight Database. o EdgeSight Database: The EdgeSight Database is a central Microsoft SQL Server with Reporting Services used to aggregate all the information from the smaller agent databases. The EdgeSight Agent runs on the host (XenDesktop) machine, collects information and stores it in a local EdgeSight Agent database. At set intervals (the XenDesktop default is 90 minutes), data is taken from the local Agent database, packaged, and uploaded through the EdgeSight Server to the EdgeSight SQL Database 1. Once the collective data for all agents is in the EdgeSight SQL Database, it can be accessed from the reporting interface on the EdgeSight Server. When using a non-persistent disk (as in most XenDesktop deployments using Provisioning Services), additional considerations need to be made as to where to store the local agent data since the EdgeSight Agent temporarily stores information on the local host before packaging it and sending it to the main EdgeSight Server. XenDesktop Best Practices for Architecture In most XenDesktop environments, there are additional considerations for an EdgeSight deployment. Since many XenDesktop architectures utilize non-persistent disks through Provisioning Services to drastically reduce storage space requirements and ease management of desktops, a default EdgeSight Agent installation may not capture all monitoring data given that desktop reboots would purge the data. In order to rectify this, there are additional deployment options that will provide data retention across reboots. This section describes three possible options along with the positive and negative impacts of each. 1 Upload times, as well as length of data retention and max database sizes are settings that can be configured depending on company requirements and storage availability. Page 5

6 The following section provides a high level overview of the three possible types of configurations, which will be described in further detail: EdgeSight Agent Direct with Attached Local Disk. This configuration is generally considered best practice, as the Agent Database is stored on an attached disk considered to be local to the desktop and is persistent across desktop reboots. EdgeSight Agent Brokered without Attached Local Disk. A Brokered EdgeSight Agent means that the Agent Database (used to temporarily store local data) resides on an external EdgeSight Agent Database Server and that server holds the information until it is uploaded. EdgeSight Agent Direct without Attached Local Disk. If the EdgeSight Agent installation is completed with default settings, the resulting configuration will be to have the Agent Database stored in non-persistent disk. While this is the simplest to configure, if nonpersistent disks are used, then agent data can be lost across desktop reboots. The three architecture options are briefly illustrated in Figure 2 and described in greater detail in the following sections. Figure 2: EdgeSight Architecture Options Page 6

7 EdgeSight Agent Direct with VM-Local Secondary Disk As a XenDesktop best practice, it s often recommended to store the Provisioning Services write cache on a drive local to the VM to improve performance, reduce network traffic, and improve the Provisioning Services server scalability. This VM-local storage can also be utilized to store the EdgeSight agent database persistent storage will allow data to be retained across reboots and potential crashes, preventing loss of critical information. This method also has the benefit of not having any additional components or configurations to manage and will fit into most XenDesktop architectures. EdgeSight Agent Brokered without Attached Local Disk Some environments mandate that user accessible machines do not have any local storage attached to them in order to prevent loss of secure data or administrators may be required to purge all data after shutdown to prevent any information from being stored persistently. For such environments, the EdgeSight Agent can be configured to point to an external Firebird database to prevent loss of reporting information. Requirements for this solution include: A file share accessible by virtual desktops. This file share will store static configuration files for the agent startup. An EdgeSight Agent Database Server. This server will host an external Firebird database that requires virtually no management. One Firebird database server is necessary for every 80 2 desktops in a pool. Each Agent and Agent Database Server is tied to a XenDesktop pool, and each registers with the EdgeSight Server on startup. When the Agent service starts, the Agent will contact the EdgeSight Server, which will then return the address of one of the Agent Database Servers assigned to the pool. Assignments will be load-balanced so that no one Agent Database Server is overloaded. This solution allows data to constantly be saved to a persistent database, and from this point the information will be uploaded to the main EdgeSight Server desktops per Agent Database Server is recommended for Windows Server operating systems. If the database is installed on a Windows Desktop operating system, 40:1 is the recommended ratio. Testing should be conducted to confirm the client s specific environment ratio performs as expected and that the Agent Database Servers are not being overloaded. Page 7

8 EdgeSight Brokered Startup Process During Agent Database Installation A XenDesktop desktop pool is specified. During Agent Installation A XenDesktop desktop pool is specified. Step 1 Agent Database services start up and register with the EdgeSight Server, passing along the pool name specified during installation. Step 2 Agent services startup on the XenDesktop and register with the EdgeSight Server, passing along the pool name specified during installation. Step 3 EdgeSight Server chooses the least loaded Agent Database server for that pool and passes the information to the Agent. Step 4 Agent connects to the Agent Database and begins delivering metrics as it would to a local Agent Database. Figure 3: EdgeSight Brokered Startup Process EdgeSight Agent Direct with Attached Local Disk If the EdgeSight Agent is installed on the XenDesktop machine with default settings and on a nonpersistent disk, such as one provided by Provisioning Services, the database will reside in the vdisk write cache. The write cache stores all changes made to a disk while the machine is online, and during reboot the information stored in the write cache is flushed. As a result, any data collected by the EdgeSight Agent that has not been uploaded to the EdgeSight Server will be lost. This loss of data can have a high cost in terms of information retention, if users are often logging in and out and desktops are set to reboot after each logout. Additionally, information immediately preceding a desktop crash will also be irretrievable, leading to difficulty in troubleshooting and forensics activity. This deployment option can be used for deployments where information regarding the desktop performance and activity is not critical and reboots are not frequent. Page 8

9 Additional Considerations In order to reduce the number of Agent Database servers, it is possible to set up the environment so that only a certain percentage of desktops are monitored essentially a sampling of the environment. Since in many XenDesktop deployments, each desktop is provisioned through Provisioning Services and is identical to the next, there is less of a need to watch over each individual desktop. Monitoring a small subset of desktops may be enough to provide necessary insight into the environment s health and note any major issues. However, intermittent issues on unmonitored desktops or issues tied to a particular user may go unnoticed in this scenario. Whether sampling should be utilized depends on the goals and requirements of the company and a decision should be made during the planning phase of a deployment. Using EdgeSight Reports EdgeSight reports provide an in-depth view into an environment s current performance and longterm health as well as offer different groups in IT access to report generation abilities. Reporting in the EdgeSight console is divided into three main categories: Troubleshooting Monitoring Planning and Managing Each section of these reports can be used by a different team to ensure that the environment is running at optimal levels and that users are receiving the best possible experience. The following sections will look at each of these categories in more detail and describe several common scenarios where EdgeSight can assist. Troubleshooting Issues EdgeSight is a powerful, highly detailed tool when it comes to troubleshooting user issues and can save time in pinpointing causes of problems. Common complaints, such as My desktop is slow! or Application XYZ keeps crashing!, can be diagnosed for specific causes and appropriate actions can be taken to remedy the situation. By having access to information such as high-level overviews of the user s device, detailed application crash information, and process-related statistics, a help desk representative or Citrix administrator can discover where most issues are occurring, including those not related to the virtual desktop itself or the XenDesktop environment. Users Complain of General Application or Desktop Slow Performance A common occurrence for help desk representatives is getting a call or explaining that their XenDesktop isn t working, with little additional detail to explain the situation. In order to resolve this issue, a help desk representative can use EdgeSight to look at the user s environment in realtime. Page 9

10 Using the Device Troubleshooter under the Troubleshooting section, the administrator can connect directly to the device to get current system metrics. In the example below (Figure 4), a quick glance at the overview shows a jump in activity in the last few minutes. Figure 4: Real-Time Device Status In this case, the desktop s CPU seems to be very active, so clicking on Total Processor Time presents a more detailed view (Figure 5). Figure 5: Device Total Processor Time Drilling down on the peak displays the details of the environment at that moment in time (Figure 6). Page 10

11 Figure 6: Total Processor Time by Process A look at the processes reveals the problem application, and a glance at the total processor time shows that the CPU was averaging over 70%, and switching to the peak time (in this instance) displayed the desktop reaching 100%. Using the Counter dropdown in the top right, the display can be switched to view other counters that may provide insight into application behavior, such as memory, paging, and thread queues. Now that an issue has been identified, additional steps can be taken. If the application is behaving improperly and should not be consuming these kinds of resources, then additional investigation into the application can be performed. However, if the application is acting as expected (such as a software compiler during builds), virtual desktops who utilize it can be assigned additional resources, or users can be educated to expect slower performance while that application is running. Latency Issues Another common help desk occurrence is users calling in to say that My XenDesktop is slow, and will mention issues such as screen painting, the mouse cursor moving slowly, or menus taking a longer than expected time to appear. In order to analyze this issue and determine the cause, one useful report to look at is the ICA Session Round Trip Time. This report provides information on both network round-trip time (from server to client) and ICA round-trip time (from initial client request to completion of screendrawing). ICA round-trip time is a better measure of user experience than network round-trip time as it more closely reports what a user actually experiences as it relates to the virtual desktop rendering. As seen in the figure below (Figure 7), different users can experience different response times. ESUser1 has almost 600 ms of perceived latency, although his network latency is almost nonexistent. This would point to an issue on the XenDesktop delivering the information across ICA, such as a lack of CPU or memory resources (this information was gathered while ESUser1 s XenDesktop was undergoing a CPU stress test). Page 11

12 Figure 7: Network & ICA Latency by User The report can then be drilled down into detailed information regarding ESUser1 s sessions and provide data as to when the user was experiencing these issues. An administrator can then correlate those times with the device s data (using the Device Troubleshooter) to find out the root cause. Figure 8 shows us an example of detailed latency information. Figure 8: Detailed Network Latency In contrast, ESUser2 experiences approximately 400 ms of latency, but about half of this is caused by network latency; whereas ESUser3 only experiences about 200 ms of perceived latency in the same environment. If additional information is needed to find where network latency is being caused, EdgeSight offers the ability to run a remote traceroute and identify which network hop is causing issues. Disclaimer: Latency numbers shown here are a product of testing in a heavily utilized test environment and are not reflective of typical XenDesktop LAN performance. Page 12

13 Once an understanding has been reached as to where the user s perceived latency is occurring, resources can be focused on investigating the correct area, whether it s within the Citrix infrastructure, in the network infrastructure, or elsewhere. Disconnection Issues If users are calling in and complaining about disconnection issues, identifying the groups and locations where these disconnects are occurring is important in troubleshooting the problem. If auto-reconnect is enabled in the farm, the Session Auto-Reconnects report will allow break-down of disconnections by user, device, date or hour. If only certain users are having an issue, it may be that their network connection has high packet loss this can happen at sites with remote users or branch locations connecting over a WAN. In a branch office situation, a network investigation may be beneficial, whereas for remote users it would be good to ask what kind of an internet connection they have, and ensure that it s not a dial-up or satellite/wireless connection with high packet loss. If disconnects are only happening at certain times, such as the morning or right after lunch and other heavy traffic periods, it may be that the network connection does not have enough bandwidth to support the branch location. If disconnects are happening across the board, then checking the physical network connections closer to the datacenter would be the ideal path, or look at the components inside the datacenter to ensure that there are no NIC issues, or software issues occurring on the machines themselves. With disconnection issues, the location and breadth of disconnects should be determined first, and then additional investigations can be taken to confirm the problem. Once the root cause has been determined, additional actions such as increasing bandwidth, integrating a Branch Repeater or replacing faulty hardware can be completed. Monitoring Proactive monitoring can identify issues before they become major outages, and help fix problems users are experiencing before they get frustrated enough to call the help desk. Monitoring can be used by Citrix administrators to get an instant, real-time overview of farm health and launch automated actions to either notify admins or repair common issues. Monitoring and Troubleshooting Application Crashes and Service Failures Using alerts can give crucial real-time information regarding a wide array of events, including service and application failures. Automatic actions can be performed, such as passing the alerts via , sending SNMP traps or running custom executables that can perform any scriptable action such as restarting a service or rebooting a server. In the example below (Figure 9), the desktop ESXP1B is having issues with the application named Crasher. EdgeSight gathers information around application crashes, such as other processes and modules running, system performance and user behavior at and immediately prior to the crash, and details of the crash itself. This information could be used to diagnose and perform forensics on the Page 13

14 crashing application without requiring the user to call the help desk or even participate in the investigation. Figure 9: EdgeSight Real-Time Alerts Another situation where alerting can be extremely beneficial is in case of a service failure. If a service occasionally fails, EdgeSight can be configured to automatically restart that service, reducing the amount of human intervention required to maintain a functional environment. The range of alerts that can be configured include a large number of events, including: system reboots, disk failures, system performance issues, application crashes, hangs and high resource usage, high network latency, XenDesktop registration failures, print services failures, and agent start failures. By configuring alerts to show critical and actionable items, problems can be realized and corrected in real-time, and may prevent major outages or help desk calls before they occur. Average & Worst Logon Times Using the Session Startup Duration Details report, the average and longest logon times can be found and broken down to the components that are causing the time consumption (not including desktop boot time, if applicable). Based on this information, changes can be made to the environment to improve profile loads, printer creation, or other aspects that require optimization. Problem users, who may have extremely large profiles or unique printer configurations, can also be identified. Investigation can start with the Session Client and Server Startup report to get an overview of user (or device) startup times. The Server Startup Duration includes: Credential Authentication, Profile Load, Logon Scripts, Printer Creation, Device Mapping and Session Creation. Client Startup includes: Config File Download, Name Resolution, Ticketing and Session Creation. Since the XenDesktop portion includes much more intensive activity then that required on the client, it s expected that Server Startup Duration will be significantly longer. The chart below (Figure 10) shows the example environment: Page 14

15 Figure 10: Session Logon Time by User In this environment, users average between 32 and 42 seconds for a logon (Disclaimer: Logon times shown are from a heavily utilized test environment with large profiles, and may not be indicative of real-world performance). In order to understand better where this time is being spent, the Session Startup Duration Details report can be used to break down the logon into its component pieces. Pulling up the details of one of ESUser1 s sessions gives the following information (Figure 11): Figure 11. Detailed Session Logon Time For a load time of almost 42 seconds, 10 seconds went to Profile Load times (PLSD), and 24 seconds went to logon scripts (LSESD). In this case, no time was spent on printer creation (PCSD) and only about 2.6 seconds were spent on creating the session. For a full description of each of the monitored startup portions see Appendix B, or hover over the acronym inside the EdgeSight console. In order to reduce logon times in this scenario, looking at the profile and the logon scripts would be most beneficial. If all users have long profile load times, confirming that folders like My Documents are being redirected or ensuring that the file server is not being overloaded would be helpful, as well as maintaining a small roaming profile size. If only one user has long profile load time, their profile should be inspected for any unusual characteristics, such as large size or a high quantity of files, and then the user can be educated, additional redirects could be enabled, or another solution can be Page 15

16 found, such as a profile management solution like Citrix Profile management. If credential authentication is taking a long time, it may suggest that the authentication server is overloaded. Long printer creation time may suggest that users have too many printers assigned to them. By monitoring the logon times, Citrix administrators can see when and where users are having issues, and fix them before help desk calls go out. They can also see if the logon problems are endemic to the entire environment or only to certain users in unique circumstances, and identify problem components that may be affecting not only the XenDesktop environment but other aspects of IT as well. Installation of Unknown Applications Many IT departments have to deal with users installing unauthorized applications into their environment, which then become business critical unbeknownst to the IT department. Using the New Processes report (Figure 12), administrators can note whenever a new application enters into usage. Figure 12: New Processes Report Application inventory can also be taken using the Process Usage report, which will report not only the processor time taken by each application, but also the unique number of users utilizing each application (Figure 13). Figure 13: Process Usage Report Knowing the application usage and composition in an environment can greatly benefit administrators, and prevent unknown applications from becoming critical to the business without documentation or IT support. Page 16

17 Event Log Maintenance Informational messages are often posted to a desktop's event log regarding the health of the operating system and application performance. Event logs can be routinely reviewed to note if common issues occur that can easily be rectified, or if a particular user has a high number of event log issues that can be traced to a root cause such as a corrupted profile. The Event Log Report can provide a summary of event log issues (Figure 14). Figure 14: Event Log Report Monitoring these logs for issues may provide additional insight into problems that may be affecting the environment. Looking at machines and users with high numbers of event log alerts and warnings can help in identifying problems before they become serious outages. Planning and Allocating EdgeSight for XenDesktop can also provide a high-level overview of the state of the environment, and help administrators plan for when additional resources are required. The summaries can be presented to higher-level management to give them a visual picture of the state of the environment. If the summaries indicate some problems or areas of concern, additional information can be gathered by drilling down into the details, and issues can be resolved before they result in major service outages. XenDesktop Environment Summary XenDesktop reports, such as user logons, resource utilization, ICA latency and logon time at various points of the day, week and quarter can greatly assist in capacity planning and setting of XenDesktop idle pool values. Page 17

18 Figure 15: XenDesktop Summary These reports can give a high-level insight into the health of the environment. If the average logon time increases drastically for one day, an issue may have occurred that requires investigation. If logon times, network/ica round-trip times, or CPU/Memory Usage are trending upwards, then additional resources may need to be brought into the environment. Drilling down into the Average Login Time by Day and Active Sessions by Day reports can give more detailed indications of what time of the day users are most likely to login and when they experience poor logon performance, thereby allowing better preparation through Idle Pool settings or better resource planning. Drilling into the ICA session latency can also give indications if the network is becoming overloaded, or if groups of users are having problems at certain locations, or at certain times during the day. Similarly, drilling into the Average CPU and Memory by day can indicate if all users or only certain departments are over or under-utilizing the resources given to them. These reports can easily be included into weekly, monthly, or quarterly status reports to give indications of the environment s current health, or into progress updates on dealing with issues of latency or long logon times. Subscriptions can be configured to have this information be automatically delivered to a file share, mailbox, SharePoint, or another location. Page 18

19 Device Performance Knowledge of how VMs are being utilized can be helpful in ensuring that users have the resources they need. The Device Summary report gives information regarding average CPU and Memory usage. Breaking this down by users and user groups can ensure that departments and power users are not throttled by lack of computing resources, and that hardware is also not being underutilized by less resource intensive groups. Figure 16: Device Summary The Device Summary (Figure 16) provides a high-level overview of device performance. What percentage of devices were over or under-utilized on CPU or memory, average network delays, event log alerts, and application related alerts are available. Alerts can also be helpful in pinpointing hardware failures or other known, actionable items. Application Faults and Performance Applications may have unexpected behavior from time to time, such as crashing or taking up a large share of memory/cpu. Understanding how applications work in a XenDesktop environment is critical to the health of the environment and user satisfaction. Information regarding applications can be seen in Process Stability and Process Summary reports - problem applications can then be identified and actions can be taken. Application crashes result in crash dumps that can then be Page 19

20 passed along to application teams for additional troubleshooting, without requiring interaction from the end user. As mentioned in previous sections, looking at memory and CPU utilization will assist in better understanding the costs of the application, and whether users who require access to those need more resources allocated to them (Figure 17 and Figure 18). Figure 17: Average Memory Utilization by Process Figure 18: Average CPU Utilization by Process Understanding what the most active applications are on the network (Figure 19), and which ones have the longest delay in response across the network (Figure 20) can also help administrators plan and manage their environment appropriately. Long applications round trip times may suggest that backend database servers do not have the capacity to serve them or simply have a large amount of processing to do before a response can be returned, and if these issues can t be rectified, then users may need to be educated to expect delays with these applications, rather than assuming problems lie with the infrastructure. Page 20

21 Figure 19: Average Network Volume by Process Figure 20: Average Network Delay by Process Finding out which applications crash or hang and become unresponsive can also give an idea of what applications users are having issues with, even if they don t report problems to the help desk. The Process Faults, Process Errors and Process Not Responding alerts can give a good overview of the issues. The chart below (Figure 21) is an example of the Process Faults report details. Page 21

22 Figure 21: Process Fault Details Report Additional information can be accessed by clicking the i next to the fault, revealing dump information and surrounding environment details (Figure 22). Figure 22: Available Crash Information Information regarding the crash dump and additional surrounding details can then be forwarded to the appropriate application teams or support staff for troubleshooting. Network Performance Ensuring the network is performing as expected is a critical task for maintaining a healthy XenDesktop environment. Reporting on internal web errors, long transaction times, and other network related factors can reveal bottlenecks, bad hardware, or misconfigurations that detract from a positive user experience and an efficient environment. In addition to reports detailing network round-trip times by device and by process (as detailed in the previous section), EdgeSight also provides details on network errors and web errors through the Site Network Errors and Transaction Web Errors reports, which can indicate misconfigurations, security and permissions issues, or blocked firewall ports (Figure 23). Page 22

23 Figure 23: Site Network Errors Report Monitoring these kinds of issues can ensure that the environment is performing as expected, and critical services are able to contact the required backend connections. Summary EdgeSight for XenDesktop is a powerful tool for understanding your environment, troubleshooting issues that arise, and assisting in planning and managing. Once an educated decision regarding the EdgeSight for XenDesktop implementation architecture is determined based on the guidance in this document, a proper deployment can be made and data can be gathered. After deployment, EdgeSight can be used as a diagnostic tool to understand user issues, a forensics tool to understand crash situations, and a monitoring tool to allow administrators to be proactive in fixing problems before they disrupt services. In addition to having significant benefits for your XenDesktop environment, EdgeSight can also be deployed to your XenApp servers, your endpoint clients, and other servers in your environment as well. Customized reports exist specifically for a XenApp environment, and there are many additional reports that can be used to provide details on virtually any environment. With its ability to integrate into virtually any environment and close integration with XenDesktop and XenApp, it can greatly improve the user experience and ease the administrator s workload without disrupting the environment configuration. For more about EdgeSight, please explore some of the following resources: EdgeSight home page: Product page with information regarding the entire EdgeSight product line, including demos and purchasing information. EdgeSight Installation and Admin Guides: These guides provide detailed information on setup and management of an EdgeSight environment, and serve as great resources. Page 23

24 EdgeSight Custom Reporting: A blog post discussing how to get started on creating EdgeSight custom reports, which are a powerful way to expand and customize EdgeSight to your needs. Integration with Microsoft s Report Builder 2008 will help create new reports quickly and easily. Additional monitoring tools and knowledge resources can be found in Appendix A. Page 24

25 Appendix A - Additional Monitoring Tools & Resources HDX Monitoring Tool: If interested in detailed information and troubleshooting regarding HDX for XenDesktop beyond what EdgeSight offers, the HDX Monitoring Tool provides additional troubleshooting and performance information. XenCenter: XenCenter is a powerful tool to manage and monitor XenServer hypervisors as well as the virtual machines running on them. XenCenter allows for configuration of workload highavailability, storage, XenMotion, and other features available in XenServer 5.5. XDPing: The XDPing tool is a command-line based application which automates the process of checking for the causes of common configuration issues in a XenDesktop environment. The tool can be used to verify configuration settings on both the XenDesktop Broker and VDA machines, both from the console and remotely. Citrix Port Check Utility: The Citrix Port Check Utility is a command-line utility that tests connectivity to a host on a specified port. It can be used to test basic ICA connectivity against Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop machines; however, it is not Citrix specific and it can be used to test any machine that listens on a port for incoming connections. Citrix Knowledge Base: A variety of white papers, hotfixes, documentation and other information can be found at the Citrix KB. Ask the Architect: The source for detailed technical information, best practices and technology discussion regarding Citrix products and product integration. Appendix B - Session Startup & Duration Acronyms Server Startup Details CASD: Credentials Authentication Startup Duration CONSD: Credentials Obtention Network Server Duration PNCOSD: PN Classic Credential Obtention Server Duration PLSD: Profile Load Server Duration LSESD: Login Script Execution Server Details PCSD: Printer Creation Server Details DMSD: Device Mapping Server Details SCSD: Session Creation Server Details SSD: Server Startup Duration Page 25

26 Client Startup Details CFDCD: Config File Download Client Duration BUCC: Backup URL Client Count AECD: Application Enumeration Client Duration IFDCD: ICA File Download Client Duration NRWD: Name Resolution Web Server Duration TRWD: Ticket Response Web Server Duration LPWD: Launch Page Web Server Duration SCCD: Session Creation Client Duration NRCD: Name Resolution Client Duration SLCD: Session Lookup Client Duration CSD: Client Startup Duration Page 26

27 Revision Change Description Updated By Date 0.1 First draft Michael Bogobowicz March QA Carisa Stringer March QA Stevan Bloom March Final Version Michael Bogobowicz April 2010 About Citrix Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is the leading provider of virtualization, networking and software as a service technologies for more than 230,000 organizations worldwide. It s Citrix Delivery Center, Citrix Cloud Center (C3) and Citrix Online Services product families radically simplify computing for millions of users, delivering applications as an on-demand service to any user, in any location on any device. Citrix customers include the world s largest Internet companies, 99 percent of Fortune Global 500 enterprises, and hundreds of thousands of small businesses and prosumers worldwide. Citrix partners with over 10,000 companies worldwide in more than 100 countries. Founded in 1989, annual revenue in 2008 was $1.6 billion Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix, Access Gateway, Branch Repeater, Citrix Repeater, HDX, XenServer, XenApp, XenDesktop and Citrix Delivery Center are trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners. Page 27