Technical Deep Dive: XenApp Load Evaluators

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One of the often overlooked features of XenApp is truly understanding the load evaluators. As a consultant, I commonly see environments using only the Default Load Evaluator. If I am lucky, they might be using the Advanced Load Evaluator. Rarely do I find organizations actively monitoring or customizing their load evaluators.

Load Evaluators have not changed much since Presentation Server days, but amazingly they are not commonly optimized. Every environment and every workload is different, so whichever load evaluator is implemented may vary, but they should be customized and monitored.

More on Citrix Load Evaluators

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Well, most of feed back I received from other industry players confirmed my initial suspicions... counters based on Windows Perf Counters where Windows is a VM are not reliable. A local area architect, who is not married to any one technology, summed it up nicely:

"You have touched on something that is inherent to the virtual world: the performance counters are always wrong. Exactly how wrong, that is debatable. In the past, I have used empirical numbers to control load. That means keying off of something like user count, memory utilization, or page swaps. It isn't an exact science, but some testing should give you the right mix."