XenApp Power and Capacity Management

Overview

The Citrix XenApp Power and Capacity management feature helps administrators reduce power consumption and better manage XenApp server capacity. It dynamically scales capacity up or down by intelligently adjusting the number of online XenApp servers available for hosting applications. This automated capacity tuning improves overall data center capacity utilization, provides sufficient capacity to handle real-time load and minimizes unnecessary power consumption.

 

Using this technology preview, XenApp customers will be able to experience the following power and capacity management features and benefits:

• Load consolidation – User sessions are automatically consolidated onto fewer servers to prevent session sprawl and enable idle capacity to be powered down or repurposed without impacting users.
• Automated power control – Set it and forget it. Simply configure the capacity capabilities of each workload and the minimum amount of idle capacity you want to maintain. XenApp power and capacity management does the rest by automatically consolidating sessions across fewer servers, powering down idle capacity and powering servers up when needed.
• Schedule driven power control – Turn the lights off when no one is home. Administrators can define specific times for powering on and powering off specific XenApp servers. For example, a schedule might power on servers at 8 a.m. and power them down at 7 p.m. from Monday through Friday.
• Manual Override – Manually disable power and capacity management for an existing workload to accommodate temporary capacity needs such as a disaster recovery situation or sudden demand surge that is likely to last for a few hours.
• Real-time capacity monitoring and reporting – Enables administrators to monitor real-time system load and observe capacity usage trends in daily, weekly and monthly intervals. Metrics are reported in simple terms, either as a percentage or by number of active sessions.
• Physical or virtual server support – This release supports Wake-on-LAN power control for physical servers or power on commands for XenServer virtual workloads via the XenServer API.

Minimum System Requirements

The following requirements must be met in order to utilize the XenApp Power and capacity management technology preview: 

XenApp requirements

• Presentation Server 4.5 with Feature Pack 1 and/or Hotfix Rollup Pack 3 (HRP3) – (32-bit and 64-bit)
• XenApp 5.0 for Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 – (32-bit and 64-bit)

General configuration requirements

• All servers must be of the same type – either physical or virtual.

XenServer requirements

• When using XenApp Power and capacity management with XenServer workloads, all servers must be in the same XenServer pool.

Microsoft Hyper-V and VMWare support

• The load consolidation features of power and capacity management can be used for XenApp servers virtualized using Microsoft Hyper-V and VMWare platforms by installing the Power and capacity management agent. Power management, however, is not available for these platforms at this time.