Update on My Citrix VMWare Machines

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Ok, if you have been following my blog, you know I have been researching and building the best possible Citrix VMs to run on my ESX Hosts. Granted, XenServer might be better for XenApp, but we work with what we have, and I have ESX 3.5.

I currently have 4 production VMs running, 2 in each production Zone. The first two in DataCenter1 went live about a month ago... and churn nicely. They will routinely show a load evaluation of 10000 (Full Load), and the 1 vCPU Utilization is fairly high (based on vCenter stats), but no complaints from users. Initial test = PASS.

A week ago, using the same template and automation scripts, I deployed 2 VMs to DataCenter2. One of these VMs became unusable. The load evaluator was showing around a 72% usage, but vCenter was showing the vCPU pegged and not letting up. An RPD session was very sluggish, to the point of being unusable. The next day, the other VM in that zone blew up with licensing errors. I have since removed those from production for futher testing. Second test = FAIL.

What is strange, same template, same processes, same relative user base and load, drastically different results. Granted, 4 machines is not a larger sample size. I plan on some load testing next week, will post results on that later.