Using VMWare and Citrix in Tandem?

Dysfnctnl85 asks: "As a follow up to the previous discussion 'Alternatives to Citrix Remote Computing?', I've hit another brick wall in my quest to enhance the way my company does remote computing. Right now I've setup Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 R2 on two 64-bit machines with 16gb of RAM each. Before I can setup Presentation Server 4, I need to install the Novell client to allow access to our NetWare servers. After doing some research on Google, and hopping forums on the Novell Support boards, I've determined that Novell has no plans to release a 64-bit client for any Microsoft OS until Vista launches." Has anyone managed to get VMWare, Citrix and 64-bit Windows working together? "Now I'm sure there are other companies out there in a similar situation (as noted on the forums and Google Groups), so I then decided to look into the virtualization market to see if I can still make my dream happen. I've been emailing my Citrix rep who in turn has been speaking with a Citrix engineer who is currently training with VMWare, coincidentally. I'm wondering if anyone has successfully ran a VMWare + Citrix solution in order to fully take advantage of dual 64bit procs, a Windows 64-bit OS, and 16GB of RAM. I was thinking of running 2 Citrix Servers within VMWare to handle maybe 8GB, effectively making 4 public Citrix servers, but I'm not sure what the best solution would be."

Comments

We're doing it!

[axp_bofh]

I'll try to get technical details tomorrow from the Citrix team (I'm on the VMS end of things), but we're a large healthcare system running a moderately large Citrix farm (~100 servers) for our clinical systems. We've got 4 DL-585's (IIRC) running 2k3 and six VMWare Citrix instances per server in production. User loading is about 20-25 users / "server". Once we got through some initial headaches, it's been quite solid. One very nice thing is that if a "server" gets bollixed up, we don't go through the usual Ghost re-imaging process to restore the server, but just copy over the VM disk image again.

Take This Into Consideration

[consolidatedbord]

Citrix is a virtual computing environment. Users are given virtual workspaces on top of their own workspace. You're wanting to put two virtual workspace servers, inside of an already virtual environment. Doubling up layers of something aren't always a good thing. Think double nat'ing - yeah, you can access resources on the other side of your double nat, but it will always cause problems eventually.

I was working with someone who wanted to do this very same thing recently and the answer from both myself, and Citrix was "no, what the hell is wrong with you." :-P I was also working with a Citrix engineer about a month ago who was testing out the same very thing you are talking about (stress tested to be a production environment not just "oh yeah, it boots, connects, NEXT") and his findings were basically "yes, it is possible, is it worth it? will it continue to work well? will performance be maintained?" The answers were all no. This was tested on both 32 and 64-bit environments all with large ammounts of RAM.