Great joint solutions offer value to customers while removing the worries of end-to-end interactions between multiple vendors.
At Citrix, we’re fortunate to have close partnerships with innovative players in the industry that build joint solutions with our products. One recent example is the SuperPacks release by Comtrade.
SuperPacks leverage the partnership between Citrix, Nutanix and Comtrade to offer a superb monitoring and reporting tool for our joint customers. This offering provides significant value to ongoing lifecycle management by using Citrix application and desktop virtualization technology on top of Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure and Microsoft System Center Operation Manager to build, monitor, and scale environments.
Comtrade Software is a well-known Citrix partner with expertise in providing monitoring solutions from Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). Last year, Citrix made a technology acquisition of Comtrade’s SCOM Management Packs for monitoring and reporting on various Citrix products and features.
Comtrade Software recently announced the general availability of the Nutanix/Citrix SCOM SuperPack, which provides end-to-end visibility across the Citrix delivery stack for Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop workloads running on top of Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure.
This so-called SuperPack is a set of SCOM dashboards that correlate health and performance data from the Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenApp and XenDesktop, with health and performance data from the Comtrade Nutanix Management Packs. Having this correlation of Citrix and Nutanix health and performance data on a single dashboard eliminates the need to take a manual look at Citrix performance and Nutanix performance in SCOM separately. This helps to obtain an overview of the Citrix delivery stack on Nutanix and enables admins to instantly identify and prevent potential resource bottlenecks within the Nutanix infrastructure that would be otherwise difficult to detect.
Check out the following dashboards in this first release of the Nutanix/Citrix SCOM SuperPack:
Citrix Delivery Groups and Nutanix Resources
This page correlates Citrix delivery group load and logon latency information with resource consumption of Nutanix VMs hosting Citrix Server OS machines and with resource consumption of the underlying Nutanix Cluster. It gives you instant information, such as if low load index or high logon latency originated from the VM or Nutanix resource bottlenecks.
Figure 1: Citrix Delivery Group and Nutanix Resources dashboard
Citrix Sessions and Nutanix Resources
This dashboard correlates the historic trends of Citrix active sessions with historic trends of resource utilisation for hosting the Nutanix cluster. It helps IT admins to decide if they need to add more resources to the hosting Nutanix cluster in case the number of Citrix sessions rise.
Figure 2: Citrix Sessions and Nutanix Resources
Citrix Server OS Machines Storage Health
This dashboard detects situations when Nutanix Storage containers or Storage Pool hosting Server OS Machines (which are a part of delivery groups) were overprovisioned and are running out of reserved space. With this dashboard, IT admins can immediately detect this situation and prevent an outage of Server OS machines and parent delivery groups because of lack of disk space.
Figure 3: Citrix Server OS Machines Storage Health
Citrix Logon Duration and Nutanix Resources
This dashboard correlates historic logon duration for the Selected Citrix Site with historic resource utilization for the Nutanix cluster that hosts it and helps IT admins to decide whether they need to add more Nutanix resources if the logon duration is increasing.
Figure 4: Citrix logon Duration and Nutanix Resources
Citrix Server OS Machines and Nutanix Resources
This dashboard shows top Server OS machines by resource consumption across delivery groups in the selected Citrix Site and hosting Nutanix cluster resource utilization. It helps Citrix admins to pinpoint the Server OS Machines with the highest resource utilization which assists them in deciding whether they need to add more resources to them or create additional ones.
Figure 5: Citrix Server OS Machines and Nutanix Resources
This comprehensive set of SCOM dashboards adds additional value for theCitrix SCOM Management Pack for XenApp and XenDesktop by enabling instant identification and pinpointing of resource bottlenecks in the Citrix delivery stack on Nutanix. This would otherwise affect QoS for Citrix Sites if not remediated on time.
The Nutanix/Citrix SuperPack is shipped with the Comtrade SCOM Management Pack for Nutanix, which is certified as a Citrix Ready solution. For more information and a free trial, visit the Comtrade Software website.
