Virtualise XenApp

Eventually the world catches up with you. A post by an attendee at the Citrix Summit 2008 reports the recommendation to virtualise your XenApp loads.

Virtualizing XenApp is a concept to get on board with in general, but it’s also logical to assume Citrix can best support and optimize their products when they are used together.

The message is that virtualizing existing and future implementations of XenApp (or Presentation Server) on XenServer can

• Reduce physical server count
• Increase availability
• Increase flexibility
• Improve performance

I have been recommending doing this under VMware for a while, and often with a lot of push back. Of course one must be sensible about it, architect appropriately and there will always be the edge cases where it does not make sense. However in principle to me there has always been a strong case.

It's good to see that Citrix are now seeing this as good officially too. We can leave the debate as to what's the best hypervisor to run it on aside.

Reminds me of those technical people who use to tell me they would never virtualise a Microsoft Server application such as Exchange or SQL. Those same people are now running it in production happily and love the benefits.