Citrix XenApp's advanced power and capacity management enables significant savings in power consumption and improved load capacity of our XenApp servers. This will ensure that our XenApps can be turned off when they are not needed and turned on automatically when they are needed, thus getting more load on fewer servers. This feature is available for Enterprise editions & Platinum de Presentation Server 4.5 (with or without Feature Pack 1) Rollup Pack 3, XenApp 5 o XenApp 6.

This is what we will achieve by enabling Citrix XenApp Power and Capacity Management, to have several servers sharing the load to really indicate how many we will need at different times, we will schedule automatic shut down/start up of the XenApps when required based on a load configuration that we must specify. The shut downs/start ups are based on WOL (Wake On Lan) for physical XenApps and if the XenApps are virtual machines (only from XenServer) they can be powered on through the configuration of 'machine managers'.

This would be the architecture of XenApp Power and Capacity where we will install agents on the XenApp servers, These will connect to the hub to supply status information. Through the management console we will be able to generate capacity reports via Reporting Services, All of this will be supported by the database.

GOOD, To install XenApp Power and Capacity, we will insert the XenApp DVD and install it on a server (the hub) the “Power and Capacity Management”,

“Next”,

We accept the license agreement,

“Custom”,

We must install the management console and the hub on a server to manage all our XenApp. We can install the database on our database server on the network.

We must indicate the farm/community that we will manage from this server, this is not the XenApp6 farm/community, but that of PCM (Power and Capacity Management) con la que podremos gestionar de forma conjunta todos los servidores XenApp que nos interese, pudiendo crear diferentes grupos de trabajo posteriormente.

Indicamos un servidor de BD y un nombre de BD (por defecto XenAppPCM) donde alojaremos la información de XenApp Power and Capacity Management,

“Install” para comenzar la instalación del producto de Citrix,

…

“Finish”,

Como dijimos anteriormente, deberemos tener instalado el agente de Power and Capacity Management en todos los XenApp, podremos realizarlo de forma manual o mediante una GPO ejecutando: msiexec /i XenAppPCMAgent.msi /qn CTX_XAPCM_ACCEPT_EULA=yes CTX_XAPCM_FARM_NAME=TundraIT CTX_XAPCM_WORKLOAD_NAME=”Tundra Servers” [CTX_XAPCM_AGENT_NOSTART=yes] [CTX_XAPCM_AGENT_ACCOUNT=Cuenta_de_Dominio] [CTX_XAPCM_AGENT_PASSWORD=Contraseña]. More info.

O de forma manual desde el CD de XenApp6 en “Agente de administración de energía y capacidad”; deberemos indicar a la granja/comunidad a la que nos uniremos para ser gestionados por el concentrador y el grupo de trabajo al que pertenecerá el servidor.

Abrimos la consola de administración desde XenApp Power and Capacity Management.

En la consola de administración iremos viendo los servidores que ya tienen el agente instalado y les hemos configurado la granja/comunidad a la que pertenecen así como la asociación a un grupo de carga de trabajo. The first thing to do will be to configure the capabilities for each type of XenApp server that we have,, in the context of this document they are 3 XenApp (2 Intel Xeon 2C with 2GB RAM and another AMD with 4C4GB RAM,), so we go to the tab “Capacities,” and for each type of profile > “Server Profile Properties,…”

We must indicate what the typical session load of the server is,, it will depend on the load of the applications it runs as well as its resources,.

Subsequently, we must configure the scheduling in which we will indicate how many servers must be available,, how many reserved sessions and/or the minimum capacity of sessions available for our users from the tab. “Schedule”.

Once configured, we can enable power and capacity management to automate load distribution in XenApp, since “Enable Power Management” & “Enable Load Consolidation”.

We will check that servers will start or stop depending on the schedule and our configuration. If a server is marked to be shut down and has connected users, it will not accept new user requests and will wait until it is free of sessions.

We can also force at any given moment (or out of necessity) override the configurations and enforce a specific configuration from “Power Controller Manual Override”.

Indicating how many minimum servers we need available, session reservation or minimum load capacity & “Start Override”,

It indicates that to revert this manual configuration we will have to stop it whenever we want.

We check that with this new configuration certain servers are already starting up.

On the “Performance art” we will be able to see different graphs with the total usage of our servers, user sessions… In the case that our XenApp servers are virtual, we will have to configure in “Machine Managers” the XenServer servers to be able to start them up.

What I said, currently, only virtual XenApp servers under XenServer are supported, we will indicate which hosts have the VMs.