What is Nutanix-Citrix SCOM SuperPack?

New version of Nutanix MP from HYCU introduces Nutanix-Citrix SuperPack

Datacenter admins use Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to get health and performance information from business critical applications and underlying infrastructure, which are collected by individual SCOM Management Packs (MPs). These MPs are not aware of each other and therefore, the monitoring information gets segregated in SCOM by individual monitored product, which makes it difficult for IT admins to correlate the information for a holistic view, since they must manually switch between different dashboards/charts to compare information. And, as you can imagine, that is very time consuming. This presents a challenge for IT departments in organizations investing in SCOM.

This challenge is addressed by the latest version of HYCU SCOM Management Pack for Nutanix (HYCU SCOM MP for Nutanix).

The Nutanix-Citrix Super Pack, which is a set of dashboards that combine health and performance information from Citrix SCOM Management Pack for XenApp/Xen Desktop and HYCU SCOM MP for Nutanix to identify potential bottlenecks in Citrix delivery stack on Nutanix could affect QoS of Citrix VDI deployment.

Nutanix-Citrix Super Pack includes the following dashboards:

Citrix Delivery Groups and Nutanix Resources‍

Dashboard combines information about the load index and logon latency for delivery group from Citrix with the resource utilization of VMs hosting it and resource utilization of hosting Nutanix Cluster, including its SSD vs HDD ratio.

This dashboard allows correlation of core Nutanix cluster KPIs and performance of Citrix delivery group and its machines. With this correlation, IT admins are able to identify if any of the Citrix issues (e.g. slow user latency) are caused by bad Nutanix cluster KPIs and, if the bad KPIs are impacting delivery groups and its users. For example, low delivery group index or increased logon duration can originate from lack of resources assigned to hosting VMs or, for instance, from low SSD Vs HDD ratio for hosting Nutanix Cluster, meaning that majority of delivery group’s data is stored on HDD drives, which is resulting in higher latency.

Image 1: Dashboard showing Citrix Delivery Group Impact on Nutanix Resources by correlating Citrix delivery group performance and hosting Nutanix cluster’s KPIs

Citrix Logon Duration and Nutanix Resources‍

Dashboard correlates logon duration trend for selected Citrix Site with the trend of resource utilization of hosting Nutanix cluster.

It enables predicting whether Nutanix resources will be able to handle the Citrix load in the future and, if more resources should be added to Nutanix to handle it more efficiently. This dashboard also allows comparing KPIs between two or more Nutanix clusters which host a Citrix Site. If one of the clusters is more utilized, you should consider migrating workloads (e.g. Citrix delivery groups) to the less utilized cluster to make the load more even.

Image 2: Citrix Logon Duration and Nutanix Resources dashboard, showing Citrix Logon duration trend and compares it with hosting Nutanix Cluster resource utilization for selected Nutanix resources

Citrix Server OS Machines and Nutanix Resources‍

Dashboard identifies top VMs (server OS machines) in the Citrix Site by resource utilization and correlates them with resource utilization of hosting Nutanix cluster.

IT admins can use it to identify the most utilized machines in the Citrix Site and assess whether they need to add more resources to Nutanix cluster or to create additional machines (VMs) for some of the Citrix delivery groups.

Image 3: Citrix Server OS Machines and Nutanix Resources dashboard is used to to identify the most utilized machines in the Citrix Site and to monitor hosting Nutanix Cluster’s KPIs

Citrix Sessions and Nutanix Resources‍

Dashboard correlates the historic trend of Citrix Site’s active sessions with a trend of resource utilization of hosting Nutanix cluster.

IT admins can now assess whether they need to add more resources to the hosting Nutanix cluster to handle the future load of adding new Citrix users to the environment.

Citrix Server OS Machines Storage Health‍

Dashboard detects when Nutanix Storage Containers or Storage Pool hosting Server OS Machines (a part of delivery group) was overprovisioned and it is running out of reserved space - for example, when you define reserved capacity for hosting container.

This dashboard enables instant detection of this situation, which would be otherwise very difficult to identify, and enables IT admins to take proactive actions in order to prevent unavailability of Citrix applications.

Image 5: Citrix Server OS Machines Storage Health dashboard identifies Nutanix Storage Pools and Containers that host Citrix Server OS machines and that are running out of reserved space

Nutanix-Citrix Super Pack is the first in the line of the Super Packs series that are available in HYCU SCOM MP for Nutanix. Others will follow in subsequent new releases, starting with Nutanix-SQL Server Super Pack and Nutanix-Exchange Super Pack.

Try all the new features of HYCU SCOM MP for Nutanix 1.2 including Nutanix-Citrix Super Pack by signing up for full 45-day free trial evaluation and stay tuned as we show few use cases for Super Packs in the next blogposts.