XenServer PVS Accelerator Sizing – Part 2


As you might have read, I recently ran a few XenServer PVS Accelerator tests to determine a starting point for the cache size.  This initial investigation looked at Windows 10 and Windows 2012R2 for boot and logon operations. Looking back, I determined that I want to include three additional items Impact of a larger cache… Continue reading XenServer PVS Accelerator Sizing – Part 2

XenServer PVS Accelerator Cache Sizing


How large should we make our PVS Accelerator cache? Too large and we waste resources. Too small and we lose the performance. Let’s take a step back and recall our best practice for sizing the RAM on Provisioning Services.  We would typically say allocate 2GB of RAM for each vDisk image the server provides.  This… Continue reading XenServer PVS Accelerator Cache Sizing

Monitoring PVS Accelerator


I love data. I like seeing numbers and graphs. I like to see if something is having an impact. I like when new capabilities provides us with the means to monitor because this data gives me reassurance that the feature has an impact instead of me simply believing it does. Let’s look at XenServer 7.1… Continue reading Monitoring PVS Accelerator

Improving Logon Time with PVS Accelerator


The title is correct.  We can improve user logon time by implementing PVS accelerator in XenServer 7.1. This actually makes perfect sense. We already showed that PVS Accelerator drastically improves VM boot times because portions of the master vDisk image are cached locally.  Booting a VM equates to roughly 80% reads and 20% writes.  VMs… Continue reading Improving Logon Time with PVS Accelerator

Provisioning Services Accelerator


An interesting new feature was included with the XenServer 7.1 release: Provisioning Services Accelerator. In a single sentence, PVS Accelerator overcomes PVS server and network latency by utilizing local XenServer RAM/Disk resources to cache blocks of a PVS vDisk to fulfill local target VM requests. Take a look at the demo video to see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_vhMf3SFks… Continue reading Provisioning Services Accelerator