Home > Blogs > VMware VROOM! Blog > Author Archives: Banit Agrawal

VMware Horizon View 5.2 Performance & Best Practices and A Performance Deep Dive on Hardware Accelerated 3D Graphics

VMware Horizon View 5.2 simplifies desktop and application management while increasing security and control and delivers a personalized high fidelity experience for end-users across sessions and devices. It enables higher availability and agility of desktop services unmatched by traditional PCs while reducing the total cost of desktop ownership and end-users can enjoy new levels of productivity and the freedom to access desktops from more devices and locations while giving IT greater policy control.

Recently, we published two whitepapers to provide a performance deep-dive on Horizon View 5.2 performance and hardware accelerated 3D graphics (vSGA) feature. The links to these whitepapers are as follows:

* VMware Horizon View 5.2 Performance and Best Practices
* VMware Horizon View 5.2 and Hardware Accelerated 3D Graphics

The first whitepaper describes View 5.2 new features, including access of View desktops with Horizon, space efficient sparse (SEsparse) disks, hardware accelerated 3D graphics, and full support of Windows 8 desktops. View 5.2 performance improvements in PCoIP and View management are highlighted. In addition, this paper presents View 5.2 PCoIP performance results, Windows 8 and RDP 8 performance analysis, and a vSGA performance analysis, including how vSGA compares to the software renderer support introduced in View 5.1.

The second whitepaper goes in-depth on the support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics that debuted with VMware vSphere 5.1 and VMware Horizon View 5.2 and presents performance and consolidation results for a number of different workloads, ranging from knowledge workers using 3D desktops to performance-intensive CAD-based workloads. Because the intensity of a 3D workload will vary greatly from user to user and application to application, rather than highlighting specific case studies, we demonstrate how the solution efficiently scales for both light- and heavy-weight 3D workloads, until GPU or CPU resources are fully utilized. This paper also presents key best practices to extract peak performance from a 3D View 5.2 deployment.

Technical deep dive on VMware VIew Planner

In our prior VMworld sessions and performance white papers, we have presented user experience performance results based on VMware View® Planner, a tool that can generate workloads that are representative of many user-initiated operations in VDI environments. While we have discussed briefly about this tool in prior occasions, there have been many requests to get the architectural details and inner working of the tool. To provide more deep dive and technical details on View Planner, we have recently published an article in the recent release of VMware technical journal (VMTJ Winter 2012), which can be found here: VMware View Planner: Measuring True Virtual Desktop at Scale.

View Planner supports typical VDI user operations and also administrator’s management operations that can be configured to allow VDI evaluators to more accurately represent their particular environment. In this paper, we describe the challenges in building such a workload generator and the platform around it, as well as the View Planner architecture and use cases. We also explain how we used View Planner to perform platform characterization and consolidation studies, find potential performance optimizations and several other use cases.