View Planner 3.0 as a VDI Benchmark

Banit Agrawal, VMware

Rishi Bidarkar, VMware

TEX5760

2 Confidential

This is an NDA deck – do not share this information.

This presentation may contain product features that are currently

under development.

This overview of new technology represents no commitment from

VMware to deliver these features in any generally available

product.

Features are subject to change, and must not be included in

contracts, purchase orders, or sales agreements of any kind.

Technical feasibility and market demand will affect final delivery.

Pricing and packaging for any new technologies or features

discussed or presented have not been determined.

Disclaimer for NDA Roadmaps

3

This presentation may contain product features that are currently

under development.

This overview of new technology represents no commitment from

VMware to deliver these features in any generally available

product.

Features are subject to change, and must not be included in

contracts, purchase orders, or sales agreements of any kind.

Technical feasibility and market demand will affect final delivery.

Pricing and packaging for any new technologies or features

discussed or presented have not been determined.

Disclaimer

4 4

Agenda

Overview

View Planner details

View Planner Usage and Demo

Results and data(Case Studies)

Conclusions

5 5

Benchmarking – Why we care ?

6 6

Understanding VDI performance scope – its complex

Hypervisor Performance

Storage Infrastructure

Performance

vCenter Performance

Client Performance

VMware View

Performance

7 7

VDI scope – Metric explosion

Which metric to focus on?

• IOPS

• Read/Write Latency

• Bandwidth

• CPU usage

• % Ready time

• Host CPU

• Memory usage

End User Experience is critical to measure

8 8

Paradox of choice

What methodology?

What tools to use?

• IO meter

• Netperf

• Esxtop

Which user profile ?

• Task worker

• Knowledge worker

• Power worker

Capacity planning?

Drive consistency and predictability

around VMware VDI solutions

9 9

VDI benchmark – Why Now?

More interest in benchmarking VDI solutions

Confusing published results

Often incorrect and

misinterpreted methodologies

Need a standard structure

and methodology

View Planner 3.0 as a benchmark provides a standard

methodology to evaluate and design effective VDI

architectures

V

D

I

10 10

View Planner benchmark goals

View Planner is geared to

• Measure virtual desktop scalability

• Used by OEM hardware and virtualized software vendors

• Allow customers and VAR’s to compare platforms and validate VDI

environments

• Help with multiple use case studies

View Planner as a benchmark is not a

• Capacity planner

• Competitive tool for VMware Horizon View

11 11

View Planner 3.0 ideas

Design goal View Planner

Scalable Built on top of tried, tested and scalable

View Planner workload

Representative

Support for common desktop user

applications

Client side timing and execution

Measure end user experience

Patented watermarking measurement

technique is agnostic of underlying

hardware, software and display protocol

Provide easy to understand

methodology

View Planner QoS methodology clearly

defines metrics for scalability while

keeping end user experience paramount

Repeatability Methodology has low run to run

variance

Ease of use and reporting Automated and central virtual appliance

for ease of configuration, provisioning,

managing and reporting

12 12

Agenda

Overview

View Planner details

View Planner Usage and Demo

Results and data(Case Studies)

Conclusions and future work

13 13

Methodology

User/VM Consolidation with QoS in mind

Each user drives an automated representative VDI workload on

the desktop

After each steady-state run evaluate combined QoS

Consolidate more users/VMs till QoS fails

#VDIMark score is based on how many users can be consolidated

on the system under test with passing QoS

14 14

View Planner – Architecture

Storage

Manage

Physical Servers

vCenter /

View

Virtual Desktops Virtual Client VMs

Remote Display

Protocol

Storage

Physical Servers

Harness

Web Interface

View

Planner

Appliance

Central web management

provides better control and flexibility

15 15

View Planner benchmark specifications

Applications and versions

• Office 2010

• Windows media player

• 720-p HD video

• Browsing applications

• IE 9 and Firefox

• Archiving with 7 zip

• Adobe Acrobat reader

1920 x 1200 desktop resolution

Workload iterations per user

Thinktime

Guest OS versions and virtual H/W

allocations

vSphere and View versions

Ramp up time

16 16

Scoring steady state iterations

Ramp down Steady state Ramp up

17 17

Scoring

VDIMark Qos Metric

• Easy-to-understand high precision operational latency metric

• Groups based on characteristics

• Group A- Interactive operations( Browse pages, modify, sort etc..)

• Group B- IO operations (Open file, save work etc..)

• Group C background load operations

• Evaluation based on reference set of thresholds for each group

• Score for the run is determined when both the following conditions are matched

• 95th % of all the Group A operations < 1 second threshold

• 95th % of all the Group B operations < 6 seconds threshold

18 18

Reporting

The main goal is to be transparent and provide as much information

to the consumers of this data as possible

Scores and reports

Hardware setup details

Software details with versions

Configuration settings

• Guest

• Applications

• Virtualization or H/W layer

Any other non-standard settings or modifications

19 19

View Planner Results

Sample Result

Submitter

Server

Storage

Description

Virtualization

Description

View

Planner

Score

Date Description Host,socket,core, Thread

Partner-x Server -XYZ S1, 4, 24 FC SAN VMW rocks!! 100

VDIMark

10/1/13

20 20

Agenda

Overview

View Planner details

View Planner Usage and Demo

Results and data(Case Studies)

Conclusions

21 21

View Planner Run Modes

Remote mode

• One client connects to one desktop. Compliant with benchmark mode

Local mode

• No clients required -> Less hardware. Not compliant with benchmark

mode

Passive mode

• Less clients required -> little less hardware. Not compliant with

benchmark mode

22 22

22

View Planner 3.0 – Benchmark Flow chart

Desktop

Client

View setup

Scale runs

VDImark

score

23 23

23

View Planner – Run Flow chart

24 24

24

View Planner Demo

View Planner 3.0 Demo

25 25

Agenda

Overview

View Planner details

View Planner Usage and Demo

Results and data (Case Studies)

Conclusions and future work

26 26

View Planner Use Cases

Platform characterization

• CPU Architecture Comparison

• CPU Scaling

• Storage characterization

Features Evaluation

User Density for special custom applications

Comparative study for different hardware/software stack

configurations

27 27

Experimental Setup: CPU architecture comparison

Desktop VMs

VMware vSphere

5.1

32-bit Win7 1-vCPU

1GB RAM

CPU Architecture 1: CPU Architecture 2 :

Intel Nehalem Intel Sandy Bridge

Xeon E5540 Xeon E5-2660

2.53 GHz 2.2 GHz (~10% lower)

8 physical cores with

HT enabled

16 physical cores with

HT enabled

Standard View Planner benchmark

configuration

28 28

CPU Comparison

• As expected, Intel Sandy bridge performs better both in group-A and group-B

while frequency is 10% lower

29 29

Experimental Setup: CPU Scaling (Increasing VMs/core)

Desktop VMs Client VMs or Users

Dell PowerEdge R720xd with

8-core Intel Xeon E5-2643 @

3.3 GHz with 256 GB RAM

with local SSD disks

VMware vSphere

5.1

32-bit Win7 1-vCPU

1GB RAM

32-bit WinXP SP3 1-vCPU

768 MB RAM

Dell PowerEdge R710 with 2-

socket 12 cores Intel Xeon

E5645 2.4 GHz with 256 GB

RAM with local SSD disks

VMware vSphere

5.1

PCoIP

30 30

CPU Scaling (Increasing VMs/core)

• QoS failing around 56 VDImark (7 VMs/core) just marginally for group-A

operations

31 31

Experimental Setup: Storage Scaling

32 32

Scaling View Planner VDImark

• VDImark scales nicely with the all-flash storage array from Violin as we double

the number of desktops

33 33

Group A Operations Response Times

• Group-A operations response times almost remains constant

34 34

Group B Operations Response Times

• Group-B operations response times almost remains constant as we scale from

285 VDImark to 560 VDImark

35 35

Total IOPS seen by the storage array

• The first iteration IOPS requirements is high, then it remains steady in the steady

state iterations

36 36

Conclusions

View Planner 3.0 benchmark enables many use cases

• Platform Characterization

• CPU & Storage Scaling

• Architecture Comparison

• Configurations Comparison

View Planner provides a standard methodology to evaluate and

design effective VDI architectures

VMware maintains published View Planner results on its web site.

The benchmark is freely available and can be downloaded at:

http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop_virtualization/view-planner/overview.html

For support, see the community and email to mailing list:

viewplanner-info@vmware.com

37 37

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THANK YOU

View Planner 3.0 as a VDI Benchmark

Banit Agrawal, VMware

Rishi Bidarkar, VMware

TEX5760