After making a P2V of a couple of physical Citrix servers at a client, Anne Jan and I did some tuning for the best performance. Since the servers were on old hardware they now are already faster, but we wanted to get the most out of it. We first removed hardware drivers like Anne Jan’s article mentioned earlier. During the installation of the VMware tools we made sure that the following options where not installed:
- Memory Control Driver: This enables ballooning, which will make the Citrix server have to wait on memory getting available from the ESX host.
- Volume Shadow Copy Service Support: At first we did not even think about this option, but during installation of the VMware tools we got errors when trying to install these.
- VMware shared folders: The KB 1317 article best describes why not to use this option.
After the installation of the VMware tools we of course made sure that any hardware tools or drivers where removed. Also make sure that you dont connect the CD-rom drive and disable the COM ports on the guest OS through Device manager.
For more information about Planning and installing Citrix on VMware you can use this document from VMware.
There are lots and lots more things you can do to optimize Citrix Servers, but these things are the most basic things you should do.