Does anyone have an average? Can you give me current numbers? (IE: We have a server farm of 10 2-way 900mhz servers. We support 500 users that are running 15 applications. An office sweet, email and 16-bit production environment. Server utilization is at 40%.)
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How many users can be supported per CPU?
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AjayM
IS-IT--Management
- Jan 3, 2002
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Well I'll tell you the three most important things to have in a Citrix box - Memory, memory, memory. I made a small upgrade from a dual 750Mhz server with 512MB of RAM to a dual 1.2Ghz with 2GB of RAM (also upgraded from NT to 2k and MF1.8 to XP), and the speed differences are small at best, I think logins are happening about 3 seconds faster. Applications run about the same.
So what's the difference? We run a fairly memory hungry program on our farm, so it's not unusual for users to be using up 40-50MB for the one application (plus all the usual user overhead, plus all the windows overhead), so with 512MB imagine what happens when you have 15 people on the machine and most of them are using the above mentioned amount of resources.
Andrew
So what's the difference? We run a fairly memory hungry program on our farm, so it's not unusual for users to be using up 40-50MB for the one application (plus all the usual user overhead, plus all the windows overhead), so with 512MB imagine what happens when you have 15 people on the machine and most of them are using the above mentioned amount of resources.
Andrew
Depends - I know; I hate that answer too.
You need to determine if the applications are CPU bound, memory bound or I/O bound. Obviously if they are memory bound, then adding more CPU will do no good, and so on.
It is best to monitor your users and applications with a tool like RM (within XPe) or SysTrack 2.0 from Lakeside Software. These tools will allow you to locate the bottlenecks first, then make CPU, memory and I/O upgrades decisions before you run out and buy the wrong upgrade.
(BTW - RM in XPe does currently have the ability to store historical application I/O statistics.)
Mike Kap
kapski@yahoo.com
You need to determine if the applications are CPU bound, memory bound or I/O bound. Obviously if they are memory bound, then adding more CPU will do no good, and so on.
It is best to monitor your users and applications with a tool like RM (within XPe) or SysTrack 2.0 from Lakeside Software. These tools will allow you to locate the bottlenecks first, then make CPU, memory and I/O upgrades decisions before you run out and buy the wrong upgrade.
(BTW - RM in XPe does currently have the ability to store historical application I/O statistics.)
Mike Kap
kapski@yahoo.com
CitrixEngineer
Technical User
"Rule of Thumb"
(I deliberately put that into quotes, because, as Mike correctly says, it all depends... The rules I lay out below are based on my own experience, not the Citrix sales blurb - but are very similar)
You can expect to get roughly 50 users on a single processor, providing you have 128Mb RAM for the Operating System and 32Mb RAM per user. The qualifier for this is that the users may only be using Word, Excel and Outlook.
Outlook suffers from memory leaks, and users invariably discover a way to launch IE, unless you've tied it right down. So you need to allow more RAM per user, because IE leaks even more than Outlook. Hopefully a pattern is forming - more apps = more RAM.
Dual processor machines are scalable, so you can still expect 50 users per processor. Quad machines are not as scalable, so only expect 35, although we had some luck using Vmware.
Once you've established a foundation baseline, it's time to consider other applications. You have 15, so you need to do a lot of evaluation along the lines of;
What resources are used by EACH application?
Those 16-bit apps are likely to require a lot of tuning - speculation is pretty useless with this type of app, since they typically do not work well in a Windows Terminal Server environment. If you can, contact the vendor and demand a 32-bit version.
How many users are likely to use each application?
Which combination of applications are likely to be run simultaneously?
What are common "clusters" of applications?
You will need a test lab for a setup of this complexity (I know I always go on about testing, but I'm just not a firefighter by nature...) - and use tools such as Systrack, RM (if you're using XPe) - or perfmon will suffice for baselining. The latter tools are better for live system monitoring and analysis.
Hope this is helpful CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk
(I deliberately put that into quotes, because, as Mike correctly says, it all depends... The rules I lay out below are based on my own experience, not the Citrix sales blurb - but are very similar)
You can expect to get roughly 50 users on a single processor, providing you have 128Mb RAM for the Operating System and 32Mb RAM per user. The qualifier for this is that the users may only be using Word, Excel and Outlook.
Outlook suffers from memory leaks, and users invariably discover a way to launch IE, unless you've tied it right down. So you need to allow more RAM per user, because IE leaks even more than Outlook. Hopefully a pattern is forming - more apps = more RAM.
Dual processor machines are scalable, so you can still expect 50 users per processor. Quad machines are not as scalable, so only expect 35, although we had some luck using Vmware.
Once you've established a foundation baseline, it's time to consider other applications. You have 15, so you need to do a lot of evaluation along the lines of;
What resources are used by EACH application?
Those 16-bit apps are likely to require a lot of tuning - speculation is pretty useless with this type of app, since they typically do not work well in a Windows Terminal Server environment. If you can, contact the vendor and demand a 32-bit version.
How many users are likely to use each application?
Which combination of applications are likely to be run simultaneously?
What are common "clusters" of applications?
You will need a test lab for a setup of this complexity (I know I always go on about testing, but I'm just not a firefighter by nature...) - and use tools such as Systrack, RM (if you're using XPe) - or perfmon will suffice for baselining. The latter tools are better for live system monitoring and analysis.
Hope this is helpful CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk
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