When talking to customers of bigger Citrix on-prem deployments, the most liked feature that they mention is that ‘it just works’. As a good second, the XenServer PVS Accelerator is mentioned without exceptions. This is understandable, as starting or making changes to a large number of VMs will bring most networks to it’s limits. This is why features like PVS Accelerator are so valuable, as it allows Citrix customers to build a solid VDI deployment without having to spend enormous sums on upgrading the network infrastructure in the data center.
Below we will take a closer look on how it works, its value and how easy it is to configure.
Optimizing Citrix Provisioning Services
Citrix Provisioning services or PVS for short is a mechanism for delivering Operating images across a network. This allows for a master image to be created and then streamed to many computers and is a really great way to manage operating system delivery across the enterprise and manage a single master image on an ongoing basis.
Because the images are delivered across the network it relies on available network bandwidth to ensure smooth delivery of the images. This can be a challenge when scenarios like boot storms occur as each virtual machine is streaming its own copy of the image from the PVS server.
What can the PVS Accelerator do?
Using the XenServer platform with the PVS accelerator to provide the PVS workloads can not only make significant improvements on the storage load, but can result in much faster VM performance too.
Please check out the video below to see a demonstration of the impact of the PVS accelerator on PVS workloads:
How does the PVS Accelerator work?
PVS delivers an identical image from the PVS farm to all the VMs that are deployed. Since the image is the same for all the VMs, there is potential to cache the image contents on the hypervisor to reduce the load on the PVS server using a feature provided by XenServer called PVS-Accelerator.
This technology caches the image contents on the XenServer host as it is read over the network from the PVS server. Once data is cached subsequent reads can be satisfied from the PVS Accelerator cache rather than having to go all the way back to the PVS server.
This technology is provided as part of a supplemental pack for Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 but is now built into XenServer 8 by default and is really easy to configure and use.
Once the PVS Accelerator cache is configured it is transparent needing no ongoing management and still allows VM agility across the XenServer hosts in a pool. You can watch the video below to see how effective the PVS Accelerator in action and see how simple it is to configure and use it.
You can test it out yourself with the XenServer Trial Edition available here XenServer Downloads.
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