Virtual Environments are very much in vogue right now because of the obvious advantages they bring in getting the most out of your hardware investment, infact having a large server these days running just one single OS does seem such a waste.
There is a down-side, the most common problem encountered with virtual environments is resource hogging. How do you prevent a virtual server or especially a virtual application from stealing all your processor time and/or memory?
With environments such as Citrix, resource hogging becomes a critical problem as the more resource consumed the fewer users a box will support. Fewer users’ means the more expensive the server and increases the likelihood of purchasing additional servers to meet demand.
It’s not an easy problem to tackle as the default tools at your disposal do not completely tackle the problem.
AppSense Performance Manager provides optimisation and workload management by distributing the available resources fairly and efficiently.
AppSense’s Intelligent Process Management (IPM) technology prioritises and smoothes the unpredictable demands that are placed on a system's processor resources. This ensures users receive consistent application response times and eliminates server lockups.
In our experience AppSense Performance Manager is a tool that works particularly well with Softricity’s SoftGrid which was recently acquired by Microsoft.
SoftGrid is going to appear in Windows Longhorn Server, as Performance Manager is a killer application it would make ROI sense to have this software on hand to.
Link to AppSense Performance Manager here and technical documentation here.
Link to Softricity’s SoftGrid here.
For all things Citrix ... Dave Caddick is the man !
Edit: Thanks Eileen for the mention !