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So, point number one – the size of the User and Profile partitions are static, not dynamic. Now, if you have, say a 20GB PvD, you will not necessarily want 50% of this for User Data as you may be using Roaming Profiles (why?!?), Citrix User Profile Management (:)) or another Profile Management system such as AppSense Environment Manager. Hello and welcome to Personal vDisks – Part 3! Wow, it’s been a while since I last posted! Hopefully, you’ve read Parts 1 and 2 and found them useful in explaining the practical sides of the new Citrix Personal vDisks and what to expect when implementing it. Clearing The Air – Fixed or Dynamic vDisks?: Have you ever heard conflicting information about a setting or best practice and wondered what was really true or the “real” best practice? Never from Citrix, right? I’ve recently heard some people saying to use fixed vDisks with PVS and others saying dynamic.
Citrix Provisioning Services is one of those components I love to sit down and play with to try and make operations such as vDisk booting faster. Since the release of Citrix PVS 7.7 there has been a few great enhancements that we can easily implement today to achieve better all-round performance with vDisks and Target Device VMs.
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One of the first things we can make use of are VHDX vDisks. VHDX first came to the world in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. Citrix PVS historically used the VHD format for vDisks and brought out support for VHDX with PVS 7.7. The VHDX format has several advantages over VHD such as better performance, protection against file corruption and larger disk size limits.
The second improvement is support for UEFI Virtual Machines. UEFI is the replacement to traditional BIOS machines and is supported on Operating Systems running Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 upwards. UEFI support was introduced to PVS in version 7.7 and allows for faster vDisk boots by making use of gigabit network speeds. Previously with Hyper-V running PVS 7.6 and below, older OS i.e. Windows Server 2008 R2 had to be created as a Generation 1 Virtual Machine. This required using the Legacy NIC, capped at 100Mbps to PXE boot in to a vDisk.With Hyper-V 2012 R2 and PVS 7.7+ you can use Generation 2 VMs with a Synthetic NIC to PXE boot. Not only do you have this NIC advantage but UEFI is also enabled on Generation 2 VMs for faster boot! Keep in mind that UEFI is only supported on Windows Server 2012, Windows 8 OS and above. To read more about Generation 1 VMs with Citrix read https://www.jgspiers.com/citrix-pvs-synthetic-nic-streaming-with-hyper-v/
The third is ReFS v2. ReFS (Resilient File System) was originally introduced with Windows Server 2012 to overcome some of the issues that exist with NTFS. When comparing performance against NTFS there wasn’t a great deal of difference. ReFS v2 was released with Windows Server 2016 and provides better provisioning (creation) and merging performance. Take for example merging checkpoints (snapshots) and backups that use checkpoints, or when you create a fixed VHDX, these operations benefit largely from ReFS. PVS 7.11 is Server 2016 ready and does support ReFS for your vDisk stores. Using ReFS to support your vDisk stores gives insanely quick merging vDisk times.
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So, how about some examples of these optimisations?
Firstly, let’s compare UEFI vs BIOS machine boots to PVS vDisks. The below machine WS2012R2NonUEFIVHD is a Hyper-V Generation 1 machine that uses both BIOS to boot and boots in to a VHD formated vDisk.And WS2012R2UEFIVHDX is a Generation 2 UEFI enabled machine and boots in to a VHDX formatted vDisk. The Generation 1 machine has two vNICs added. One Legacy NIC for the boot process and a Synthetic NIC which takes over streaming once the Virtual Machine is running off the vDisk stream. Just to confirm the UEFI machine needs to have Secure Boot disabled as PVS cannot support Secure Boot enabled machines (unless you are using XenApp 7.12+). Also these two Virtual Machines will use a BDM ISO to receive the bootstrap. The UEFI machine has a UEFI enabled BDM ISO which is a supported boot method in PVS 7.9+.The first boot shows the BIOS machines booting in to a VHD vDisk. 24 seconds, not too bad at all. 12 seconds for the UEFI machine booting in to a VHDX vDisk! That is half the time than the BIOS machine took. Notice the throughput is also twice as much.Next we can look towards ReFS for vDisk merging times. On a Windows Server 2016 box with an unformatted partition that will act as your PVS vDisk store, choose ReFS as the file system when formatting the partition.Now we have storage partitioned with ReFS, and vDisks will be placed on this storage.
The first test is merging a 2GB differencing disk to the base vDisk using NTFS storage. Both VHDX and VHD vDisks do not experience much of a difference in merging times, VHDX being slightly faster.The second test is merging a 2.7GB differencing disk to the base vDisk on ReFS storage. The VHDX version is much quicker than the VHD vDisk. The time it took to merge a VDHX disk was an incredible 4 seconds! The time is took for the VHD disk was 2 minutes. 4 seconds merge time for VHDX disk. Also, read up on this blog post https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2016/01/12/turbo-charging-boot-times-with-pvs-7-7/ from Nick Rintalan which explains how using 2vCPUs on PVS 7.7+ Target Devices can again boost performance due to the PVS driver now being multi-threaded. By simply adding a second vCPU to my Target Device I was able to shave another 3 seconds off boot time and down to single digits.
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- XenDesktop 7.1
- XenDesktop 7
- XenDesktop 5.6
- XenDesktop 7.5
Objective
This article describes how to resize the Personal vDisk (PvD).
Instructions
To resize single or multiple PvD, complete the corresponding procedure.
Procedure for resizing a single PvD
Note: You cannot resize PvDs on Windows XP machines hosted on VMware ESX using this technique.
Complete the following procedure to resize a single PvD:
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Validate the machine containing the PvD is shutdown and configured to be in maintenance mode.
Use the hypervisor console (XenCenter, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, etc) to locate the machine containing the PvD to be resized.
Select the Storage tab or Configuration pane, as appropriate for the console in use (to display disks attached to that machine or virtual machine).
Resize the PvD disk to the desired size using the hypervisor console.
Remove the machine from maintenance mode. Resizing takes effect the next time the machine is switched on.
Procedure for Resizing all the PvDs in a Catalog
The following points must be taken care while resizing the PvD:
A PowerShell script is included in this release that allows you to resize all the existing personal vDisks in a catalog. The script iterates through the machines in the catalog, changing the size where possible. Resizing takes effect the next time the machines are switched on.
You cannot resize PvDs on Windows XP machines hosted on VMware ESX using the script.
Batch convert word doc to docx download. Do not use the script to manage existing environments in other ways. Use Desktop Studio or Provisioning Services for other management operations.
Before following this procedure, determine the current size of the personal vDisks and choose a new size. In addition, the following PowerShell snapins must be installed on the computer running the script:
XenServer deployments require XenServerPSSnapIn. This is available in the XenServer Software Development Kit (SDK) or from http://community.citrix.com/display/xs/Download+SDKs
VMware ESX deployments require VMware vSphere PowerCLI. This is available from http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/PowerCLI/
Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager deployments require the Virtual Machine Manager snapin. This is installed automatically when you install that component's console.
Put the machines in the catalog into maintenance mode.
Locate the script resize-personal-vdiskpool.ps1 in the SupportToolsScripts folder of the full or upgrade image.
On the Desktop Delivery Controller machine, start a PowerShell command prompt. Worlds lotsdaruma fields saddlery.
Run the script and select the catalog whose personal vDisks you want to resize and accept default options for storage location and thin provisioning options. If a script “signing error” occurs, run the command Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned from the PowerShell command prompt to dismiss it.
Note: If you do not have full administrator rights in Desktop Studio and you are using a 64-bit system, run the script from a 32-bit PowerShell administrator command prompt.
Type the new size for the personal vDisks. The minimum is 3 gigabytes (GB). Additional space might be required for user applications and data.
When prompted, confirm the selections you made.
Type the administrator's user name and password.
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The personal vDisks in the catalog are resized in all applicable places and the machines they are attached to are restarted. When disk preparation is complete, the machines are shut down. This process might take several minutes to complete.
Note: After execution, the script lists the machines whose vDisks could not be resized. Check the power state of these machines, and rerun the script to complete the resizing operation on the remaining machines in the catalog.