Things You Can Do in 16 Minutes: Pushing the VDI Performance Envelope with Cisco UCS, VMware Horizon View and EMC VSPEX

So what exactly can you do in 16 minutes?  Well, you can:

• Download and install your preferred tax prep software, because (if you’re in the US or Canada) April is coming
• Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame, then reminisce and/or lament about it for exactly 1 minute.
• Save 15% on your car insurance (you can supposedly get this done in 15 vs. 16 min.)
• Do some really unsavory things not suitable for mentioning on a nice blog post like this one.

Don’t care about any of those things?  Neither do I.  Let me come back to this in a moment…

If you’re familiar with our architecture portfolio for desktop virtualization, you may be aware that we’re continuing to invest in VSPEX-based reference architectures for Cisco Desktop Virtualization.  This week, we just announced the latest addition to the Cisco Validated Design (CVD) portfolio – our solution for VMware Horizon View 5.3 with Cisco UCS and EMC VSPEX available here.

If you’re not already familiar with them, CVD’s provide prescriptive design guidance around how to build solutions with specific outcomes (performance) as documented through a testing/documentation discipline that Cisco’s been doing for years.  You’ll find our repository of desktop virtualization CVD’s here.

So now let’s talk about the CVD itself.  Our principal author is Ramesh Guduru – he’s a Virtualization Systems Engineer in Cisco’s Data Center Business Group and has extensive experience in Horizon View, virtualization infrastructure and management, Cisco UCS and storage.  Ramesh assembled a test platform based on the setup shown in Figure 1. 

As you can see the core pillars of the solution are:

• VMware Horizon View 5.3
• VMware vSphere 5.5 
• Cisco Unified Computing System  and UCS Manager 2.2
• EMC VNX5600

Key things we wanted to expose/profile in this effort included:

• More with less – more powerful processors and faster memory
• System footprint for delivering 2,000 Horizon View desktops, while still retaining room to expand as demand increases
• Leverage more economical processors – ex: a 57% lower list price for the Intel E5-2680 v2 10-core processors vs. top bin processors tested in the past = lower server cost = lower per desktop CAPEX
• Hosting density leadership (# desktops per compute blade)
• End user experience as exercised using LoginVSI with medium workload with Flash
• Boot-up and login performance (simulating the Monday-morning boot storm dilemma all VDI implementations face and daily login storms)·
  

From a design perspective we also wanted to ensure our system provided:

• Full n+1 fault tolerance across the stack
• Fully virtualized platform, inclusive of the virtual desktops, as well as the infrastructure componentry like vCenter, AD, SQL servers etc.

I’ll leave it to you the explore the methodology Ramesh followed for the CVD, but let me point to a couple interesting things gained from this effort:

• With our B200 M3 blade, we increased our desktop workload capacity (across the system) by 30% compared with full-width blades used in prior analyses
• We collapsed the footprint from 30 RU down to just 12 RU.
• The combined effect of the selected CPU (Intel Ivy Bridge), high-bandwidth, low-latency unified fabric, and our VIC 1240 converged networking adapter yielded exceptional user experience at under 1.75 sec at full load.
• The EMC VNX5600 provided outstanding storage performance for both file and block, using EMC Fast Cache technology.
• VMware Horizon View 5.3 with Sparse Virtual Disk gave us better disk performance and disk space efficiency.

And as for the 16 minute thing?

• That’s how long it took for the full population of 2,000 virtual desktops to get booted and ready to login (under 16 minutes).  And in an additional 14 we had all of them running user workload with no sign of exhausting the system.

Get the details by digging into the CVD posted here