AppSense

[yoz2002]

I've been asked to look at AppSense which is a tool to manage processor and memory usage in a Metaframe environment. For what it does it seems expensive (£900/server).

In the longer term the user/application base is set to increase so it would probably be useful. Does anyone have any experience with it?

Given that past Feature Releases have negated the need for some 3rd party tools what I don't want is to deploy it and then find Feature Release 3 does what we want!

Thanks.G.

 

[DaSmee]

Hi, I evaluated Appsense performance Manager for our Citrix Farm, we found that it generated a large number of Page Faults, and although the processor management side is useful, in that it can prevent the system locking out at 100%, the memory management is not of all that much use, you will find that you can restrict the maximum amount of memory on a per user basis, but not on a per application basis, so trying to figure out how much memeory every user needs to be able to effectivly run their suite of applications is a near impossibility. (Of course, Appsense may change this in future releases).

From experience, I have found that so long as you keep your non-core applications seperated from your Desktop Servers by runnning them on a couple of Published Application Servers, you can reduce the number of processor related problems you may come across, we also proactivly monitor the processor utilization using standard Perfmon, and just deal with the occasional issue as they crop up, these are few and far between.

For memory management, I would recommend TScale from Kevsoft

http://www.kevsoft.com

(Yes, I know, it's a dodgy name for a company!) Just for a change, we found that it actually lives up to it's claims of increasing the performance/user capacity of the TS by up to 30%-40%, it is approximately £400/server based on Dual Processor boxes, and worth every penny. I would invest in it again, and just proactivly monitor the processors and address the occasional issue as they occur. YOu could also use a product such as MonitorMagic from PNL Tools,

http://www.pnltools.com

this would provide alerts whenever a problem occurs.

 

[yoz2002]

Thanks a lot for that. Really, really useful. G