Many of us who worked on XenApp servers with Windows 2000/2003 remember tuning the SMB settings of MaxMpxCt. In short, this allowed a XenApp server to make more simultaneous SMB connections to a file server. Think about it, on XenApp, you have 50-100 users making connections to a file server. The file server sees those connections coming from a single source, the XenApp server. The file server is trying to protect itself from getting slammed by a single system. Unfortunately, this slowed down user requests to the file server, thus impacting the user experience. To overcome, we would modify 4-5 different registry keys.

What should we do with Windows 2008R2 XenApp servers? What if the file server is 2003? What if it is 2008? Dan Allen, one of our Sr. Architects in Citrix Consulting, provides an awesome analysis and recommendation for these different scenarios in his post called SMB Tuning for XenApp and File Servers on Windows Server 2008. This is one you want to keep in your bag of optimizations for XenApp servers.

Daniel – Lead Architect