Installation guide

Chapter 4. Examples of Windows Terminal Server and MetaFrame design 33
The customer desired to provide users with a consistent environment, regardless of which
MetaFrame server they log on to. This includes a user’s default printer, last documents
accessed, and Web favorites. This is achieved by using roaming profiles, stored on a file
server. When a user logs on to one of the MetaFrame servers, the user’s profile is
downloaded from the file server and saved back to the server when the user logs off.
To secure the 16 terminal servers and to provide a list of application icons for each user,
Group Policies are used. All 16 terminal servers are placed in their own Active Directory
Organizational Unit, to which a Group Policy is assigned. See 5.2, “Group Policy Object
(GPO) and profile configuration” on page 37, for more details on Group Policies.
All user data is stored on separate file servers. Applications are installed identically on each
MetaFrame server.
The customer performed network bandwidth capacity planning and found that ICA traffic was
on average 5 Kbps for each remote user. For 50 users accessing Citrix from a remote
location, the recommended CIR for the frame-relay network is 250 Kbps. Under the ICA
client’s Server Group configuration setting, the TCP/IP address of Data Collector server and
Backup Data Collector servers are entered. All ICA clients configured in this way contact the
Data Collector server for published application information across a wide area network.
4.4 A consolidated MetaFrame environment
A large customer with an substantial investment in Citrix MetaFrame wants to upgrade and
consolidate the 60 Citrix MetaFrame servers it has across its organization. These servers are
evenly distributed across two data centers. The various applications are assessed. Then it is
decided to consolidate the MetaFrame servers running standard desktop applications such
as Microsoft Office and Outlook. Other applications with more demanding CPU and memory
requirements remain on their dedicated MetaFrame servers. Forty-six of the 60 servers are
consolidated.
We recommended that the customer fits large x440 servers with eight processors and 16 GB
of RAM. Each x440 server is installed with VMware ESX Server and is configured to run eight
virtual Citrix MetaFrame XPe servers. For optimum performance, each virtual machine is
allocated a virtual CPU to a physical CPU. Each virtual machine is also configured with 2 GB
of RAM, which was equivalent to the amount of RAM allocated to each MetaFrame server in
the existing environment. Six large x440 servers replace the existing 46 MetaFrame servers.