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Using VMWare and Citrix in Tandem?

Posted by Cliff on Tue Jul 11, 2006 09:55 PM
Operating Systems Software Windows Novell
Dysfnctnl85 asks: "As a follow up to the previous discussion 'Alternatives to Citrix Remote Computing?', I've hit another brick wall in my quest to enhance the way my company does remote computing. Right now I've setup Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 R2 on two 64-bit machines with 16gb of RAM each. Before I can setup Presentation Server 4, I need to install the Novell client to allow access to our NetWare servers. After doing some research on Google, and hopping forums on the Novell Support boards, I've determined that Novell has no plans to release a 64-bit client for any Microsoft OS until Vista launches." Has anyone managed to get VMWare, Citrix and 64-bit Windows working together?
"Now I'm sure there are other companies out there in a similar situation (as noted on the forums and Google Groups), so I then decided to look into the virtualization market to see if I can still make my dream happen. I've been emailing my Citrix rep who in turn has been speaking with a Citrix engineer who is currently training with VMWare, coincidentally. I'm wondering if anyone has successfully ran a VMWare + Citrix solution in order to fully take advantage of dual 64bit procs, a Windows 64-bit OS, and 16GB of RAM. I was thinking of running 2 Citrix Servers within VMWare to handle maybe 8GB, effectively making 4 public Citrix servers, but I'm not sure what the best solution would be."
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Dysfnctnl85 asks: "The company I work for relies heavily on remote computing through a Citrix MetaFrame server. The reliance on this stems from the structure of our accounting software and the fact that we have 2 remote sites that need to access this data all day, everyday. We are investigating alternatives to the Citrix system we currently operate. How do companies of similar structures deal with this type of problem? Is it feasible (or practical) to use Windows Terminal Services to achieve everything Citrix is capable of doing? This includes, but is not limited to, the ability to print from the Citrix session to a user's printer, the ability to access network drives from the Citrix session, access the user's local drives through the session, and the ability to use published apps. The main concern with this type of setup is the ability to print. What alternatives are there to Citrix?"
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Using VMWare and Citrix in Tandem? 25 Comments More /

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  • D'oh! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sharkey (16670)
    I feel for you, buddy. I've been at the "Oh shit!" stage of realizing during implementation that I missed something $REALLY_IMPORTANT in planning myself.

    I am also hoping for some interesting and informative answers, since I am currently investigating using Windows Enterprise x64 to do a Terminal Services environment within MS Virtual Server using the "free" licensing of the virtual OSes. (My $ORK_PLACE steps on your neck for buying a 6-pack of Coke when on the road, penny-pinching *EXPLETIVE DELETED*.)

  • Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by obeythefist (719316) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @10:13PM (#15702938) Journal
    The problem seems to be Novell drivers, not anything else. Try running it without Novell connectivity first.
    • The problem seems to be Novell drivers, not anything else. Try running it without Novell connectivity first.

      Let me start by saying that I'm Dysfnctnl85's coworker. With our company's infrastructure, we *have* to have Novell access for the clients. We are using it primarily for NDPS and our NFS. All of the users' files are stored on Novell shares with a great deal of permissions settings, so there's no way of getting around needing Novell, short of migrating to another network architecture.

  • An easy solution is... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SirTalon42 (751509) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @10:17PM (#15702955)
    You could always run a 32 bit OS on the servers (at least till novell releases the 64bit client). If theres nothing you need specifically from the 64bit-ness you won't really be losing anything really (though I don't really know what hardware or software you plan on running).
    • ram? wouldn't the limit be 4 gig if not in 64bit mode?
    • He'l lose performance, running in 32bit mode you have to use nasty paging hacks to access 16GB of ram, and i believe theres a 2GB or 4GB limit per process (which might not matter).
      Also you lose access to the extra registers available in 64bit mode...
      Finally if he's using AMD cpus, then no 32bit version of windows supports NUMA properly (not sure if the 64bit versions do)

  • We're doing it! (Score:4, Informative)

    by axp_bofh (930745) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @10:28PM (#15703006)
    I'll try to get technical details tomorrow from the Citrix team (I'm on the VMS end of things), but we're a large healthcare system running a moderately large Citrix farm (~100 servers) for our clinical systems. We've got 4 DL-585's (IIRC) running 2k3 and six VMWare Citrix instances per server in production. User loading is about 20-25 users / "server". Once we got through some initial headaches, it's been quite solid. One very nice thing is that if a "server" gets bollixed up, we don't go through the usual Ghost re-imaging process to restore the server, but just copy over the VM disk image again.
    • "Copy over the disk image again"? Don't VMware's server products support snapshots and incremental disk writes which you could simply discard?
  • At least, it did under XP Professional x64 w/ IIS installed, back when I was using that.

    It runs under WoW64, but seems to work fine. I did it for months without incident.

    VMWare supports x64.. but not by providing x64 binaries, just by insuring their code runs under Windows on Windows.

    <3 your f*cked up penny pinching configuration.. I used to work for a company like that, and it sucks.

    • VMWare supports x64.. but not by providing x64 binaries, just by insuring their code runs under Windows on Windows.

      Elaborating on the Parent further, WMWare Workstation (5.5.1 if anyones keeping track, not tried Server or had the luck to get grubby with ESX) does run as a 32-bit process on x64 Windows, BUT on x64 it allows you to also have x64 Guest OSs, whereas if you run it on a 32 bit host OS, you are (obviously) restricted to to 32-bit only Guest OSs.

      The thing I don't get is, how can a 32-bit Applicatio

  • Is Netware needed? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mkiwi (585287) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @10:37PM (#15703037)
    So you want to run Citrix as your front end. That is a pretty good choice.

    The main question is what are you running behind Citrix. Citrix itself does very little but present a screen to a virtual server. My experience has been that the thing behind Citrix- Netware in your case -is the thing that causes the most problems. Definately consider switching to an A/D setup if you have not already started migrating users from Netware to A/D. With A/D and cool projects like OpenLDAP you can do some pretty neat web based things with Java or PHP. (I have not checked in to other languages as of yet) When your company asks you to implement a fully customizable web portal using IIS (eek!) that accesses all this information, PHP is a good ally to have.

    • Nothing wrong with Novell's eDirectory/NDS. It is generally considered better than A/D and has the LDAP compatability layer.

      Anyway, sounds like they are pretty set on Netware for now. I think he made that pretty clear.

      -matthew
    • In terms of security, A/D is actually a lot more of a headache than Novell's offering...
      But your right, the biggest issue with citrix is the applications behind it, many windows programs are simply not designed with security or multiuser usage in mind, there are often ways to execute arbitrary code and very little protection against excessive resource utilisation, create a corrupt word document, load it up on a shared citrix server and watch the calls to support go through the roof.
  • Citrix is a virtual computing environment. Users are given virtual workspaces on top of their own workspace. You're wanting to put two virtual workspace servers, inside of an already virtual environment. Doubling up layers of something aren't always a good thing. Think double nat'ing - yeah, you can access resources on the other side of your double nat, but it will always cause problems eventually.

    I was working with someone who wanted to do this very same thing recently and the answer from both myself, and Citrix was "no, what the hell is wrong with you." :-P I was also working with a Citrix engineer about a month ago who was testing out the same very thing you are talking about (stress tested to be a production environment not just "oh yeah, it boots, connects, NEXT") and his findings were basically "yes, it is possible, is it worth it? will it continue to work well? will performance be maintained?" The answers were all no. This was tested on both 32 and 64-bit environments all with large ammounts of RAM.
    • I can't say who I work for, aside from the fact that it's financial services, but something is wrong. With regards to "I was also working with a Citrix engineer about a month ago who was testing out the same very thing you are talking about," it seems your engineer is unaware of the solutions Citrix is supporting with some of its biggest and best clients.

        • I'm not a guru on this, but once tried VMWare 3.2 with Citrix on basic 32 bit x86s a few years back. Never did get it working well. Possibly would have better luck now, with all the improvements. Yeah, it wasn't the greatest idea, but that's the sort of stuff you're told to check out when the ruling paradigm is paranoia over security. If prompting for a password increases security, making users go thru 2 or more password prompts is even more secure, right?

          AMD and Intel's websites don't make it easy to

  • Horrible. (Score:3, Informative)

    by 222 (551054) * <[stormseeker] [at] [gmail.com]> on Tuesday July 11 2006, @10:44PM (#15703061) Homepage
    I currently have a duel 3.4 64 bit Xeon box / 8GB RAM running VMware server beta and it's really not worth persuing. Any qualified Citrix consultant would tell you the same...I'm almost certain Citrix themselves don't recomment a setup like this.
    I know this because I'm an avid fan of VMware, and inquired myself... (I'm also currently upgrading to PS4).

    If you want to use VMware, get ESX...At least you can retain some performance, and VMotion offers nice flexibity. (At a price, though!)
    It's not to say that VMware can't play a role in a Citrix rollout...It's a fine testing platform, and also a solid choice for Installation Manager...but aside from that you're wasting your time.

    After speaking with a couple of Citrix consultants, I've used VMware exactly as I've described, and it's worked out fairly well. Virtualization is godsend, but not fit for *every* problem... yet ;)
    • It all depends, there are lots and lots of installations of Citrix inside VMware, it's a relatively common action. The main reason behind it is the memory address limitations of 32bit windows, you can create as many citrix instances as you want for no cost (each windows server is an additional cost, but in the grand scheme of citrix it's a minor cost). As for the 64bit windows + citrix I don't know how things play (I'm not really a windows guy but I know enough from being involved in their projects).

      And i
      • It's not a memory issue. Hell, most of my VM's even come close to capping their potential limit.

        As far as VM Citrix setups go, I'd love to see how that worked.... but as you said ESX is better. Comparing the ROI on Citrix VS ESX isn't an easy task, though... and while GSX may be better, I still fail to believe that it can provide a responsive Citrix config.

        I'm not refusing to believe, though... I'd just like to see it. I've been the primary pusher of VM's (the DR aspect alone is enough to give me a gumby
        • Actually it is a memory issue, with win32 you have to start doing tricks to address higher memory space (/3 /4 /pae each having their drawbacks and problems with citrix & terminal services). Citrix+32bit tends to top out and adding more cpu gives you hardly any benefits because you've run out of addressable kernel memory space. It's been used for this purpose for a number of years now.
  • You have no reason to go 64-bit in the corporate right now. Its still not there yet. You have almost nothing to gain from going 64-bit.

    So whats the problem again?

  • We do this where I work (Score:4, Informative)

    by illumin8 (148082) on Tuesday July 11 2006, @11:53PM (#15703281) Journal
    We have about 10 Citrix Servers running on a VMware ESX 2.5.3 system on HP BladeCenter (AMD Opterons). It works pretty well overall. We found out that you definitely need the SMP upgrade component so each Citrix instance can access two physical processors. VMware ESX 2.5.3 only supports 3600 MB max memory per guest OS and only 32-bit guest OS's, however, VMware ESX 3 just came out and it now supports 64-bit guests, with up to 16GB of RAM each, and up to 4 processors each (physical processors, not just virtual).

    The benefits of ESX server are pretty great. Secure remote console. Remote power. Ability to clone your VMs (with VirtualCenter, or a free perl script). Ability to migrate a running VM to a different server without shutting it down (google vmotion). The benefits of running virtualized are even greater than maximizing the use of hardware. Manageability is a big plus to going virtual.

    Anyway, in your situation, I would recommend installing ESX server on your two big boxes, and using many smaller 4GB 32-bit Citrix servers. Citrix will automatically load balance your apps among your server farm, and ESX will let you load about 4-5 Citrix servers on a single physical box/blade.

    Also, get some shared storage (SAN, or even SCSI disk shelf attached to both servers) so you can use Vmotion to migrate VMs around. Imagine how cool it is when you need to do a hardware upgrade or fix a bad component to just migrate the VMs off, do your maintenance, then migrate them back on, without scheduling downtime or the users even noticing. I've even run a countinuous ping to a VM, done a migration from one blade to another, and watched it never miss a single ping. It dumps the contents of memory across a gigabit ethernet connection to the other node, then somehow points it at the shared disk drive on storage, never missing a beat/ping...

    As always, YMMV.
    • Was there any additional latency on a couple of the ping responses?

      Your solution also works around a common problem - resource utilisation and general user fuckups, each user can only crash one of the smaller virtual boxes instead of the whole system.

  • Cost considerations, plus more thoughts... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ejoe_mac (560743) on Wednesday July 12 2006, @01:13AM (#15703504)
    First off decide of you really need Citrix or not. There are a few things it does well, mostly on a management / printing basis. Take a look at some sort of SSL Presentation box (F5 Firepass / etc) to do your presentation. Using basic Termainal Services works fine for some situations.

    Now Microsoft is allowing 4 free instances of their OS when you're running on Windows 2003 R3 Enterprise/Advanced, and using Virtual Server 2005 R2. I know it's a MS hot dog next to VMWare's Prime Rib, but when $$ matters there is compromise to be had.

    I've used ESX for Win2003 std Terminal Server - due to the users each mapping 4 printers back each (yea Windows Server with 35 people connected, each bringing 4 printers - didn't work well). There's a check box in ESX for "Citrix Workload".

    In a perfect situation, I'd use Citrix to publish applications. I'd create 1-3 VM's on each server for each application published (5 apps = 5-15 VM's per server). Use Citrix to balance the load across those servers (or an external appliance). This would allow for a fairly consistant load across the servers without any additional features. If you're in it for the money, create 2 VM's per task and use the new Vitual Infrastructure 3 DRS feature to allow automatic VMotion if a single server gets overloaded.

    Something to think about, but remember using a Vitrual platform has so many advantages to strictly hardware I'd overlook the Citrix people saying "no". Rebuilding a server in 3 short mouse clicks is just too amazing.
  • VMWare + Citrix presents an interesting new way of looking at providing remote access, but IMO it hooks VMWare's very strong wagon to Citrix' aging horse. IT Administrators tend to like Citrix because it gives them an easy way of centrally managing their remote users, but non-LAN-connected users hate Citrix because of the reduced graphics quality and poor performance over slow links.

    There are some other interesting solutions [roudybob.net] out there that use virtualization concepts to provide better end user experiences.

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