VD2566

VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Performance and Best Practices

In this talk, we discuss the performance characteristics of VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI).
VDI deployments typically involve a very large set of identical virtual machines sharing the same resources. While this offers significant cost savings, VDI stresses the hypervisor in new ways and has different characteristics compared to other virtualization deployments. To study VDI, we created a workload consisting of several typical office applications based on feedback from customers. We describe our workload and methodology and then present performance results that focus on the scaling properties of CPU, memory, and storage. Unlike long-lived server workloads, VDI introduces use cases such as simultaneous booting, suspending, resuming, and powering-off of virtual machines. We present the performance of a "boot storm" that occurs when several hundred VMs are powered on at once and can be common in a VDI setup.
Based on this study we recommend best practices for VMware VDI environments. The topics discussed include:
* CPU and Memory consolidation ratios with Windows XP and Vista
* Memory page sharing traits including the impact of Vista's ASLR security feature
* Desktop to LUN ratio
* Consolidating storage with Scalable Virtual Image
* Effects of Provisioning operations on storage performance

Technical Overview Session

Networking; Storage / Backup; VMware Infrastructure; Virtualization Platform / Hypervisor

1 Hour

Ken Barr( VMware,Inc. ), Sunil Satnur( VMware, Inc. ), Devaki Kulkarni( VMware, Inc )

Sunil Satnur is a Senior engineer on the performance team. His primary focus is on storage architectures for VDI systems. He has developed the client benchmark to measure application latencies on VDI systems.

Devaki Kulkarni has been working for the performance group at VMware Inc for the past several years. She has studied and optimized performance for the ESX Server, specially in the area of storage, and has presented at VMworld before.

Ken Barr works in the Core Performance group at VMware, Inc. in Cambridge, MA. He studies the performance of the monitor and the vmkernel. Ken received his Ph.D. from MIT CSAIL's Computer Architecture Group in 2006.
At MIT, Ken performed research on Energy-Aware Lossless Data Compression and on techniques to accelerate simulation-based microprocessor design.
Prior to coming to Cambridge, Ken received his BSE in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan. He and his wife sit on the Board of Directors of the U-M Alumni Club of Greater Boston.