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VMware Horizon 6 with View: Performance Testing and Best Practices

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In the blog here, we just published the updated white paper VMware Horizon 6 with View Performance and Best Practices that describes the performance gains achieved with the latest Horizon 6 enhancements. The paper details the architecture systems used for testing the features and recommends best practices for configuring your system.

The white paper talks about the following performance results:

  • RDSH sizing
  • Display protocol performance
  • PCoIP default settings changes
  • VDI characterization on Virtual SAN

Finally, some of the best practices are presented:

  • RDSH virtual machine sizing
  • RDSH session sizing
  • RDSH server virtual machine optimization
  • Guest best practices for bandwidth and storage
  • PCoIP settings
  • 3D graphics settings
  • Virtual SAN configurations

Please check out the VMware Horizon 6 with View Performance and Best Practices  paper for detailed descriptions of the tests, the results of those tests and the best practices.

 

VMware View Planner 3.5 and Use Cases

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by   Banit Agrawal     Nachiket Karmarkar

VMware View Planner 3.5 was recently released which introduces a slew of new features, enhancements in user experience, and scalability. In this blog, we present some of these new features and use cases. More details can be found in the whitepaper here.

In addition to retaining all the features available in VMware View Planner 3.0, View Planner 3.5 addresses the following new use cases:

  • Support for VMware Horizon 6  (support of RDSH session and application publishing)
  • Support for Windows 8.1 as desktops
  • Improved user experience
  • Audio-Video sync (AVBench)
  • Drag and Scroll workload (UEBench)
  • Support for Windows 7 as clients

In View Planner 3.5, we augment the capability of View Planner to quantify user experience for user sessions and application remoting provided through remote desktop session hosts (RDSH) as a sever farm. Starting this release, we will support Windows 8.1 as one of the supported guest OSes for desktops and Windows 7 as the supported guest OS for clients.

New Interactive Workloads

We also introduced two advanced workloads: (1) Audio-Video sync (AVBench) and (2) Drag and Scroll workload (UEBench). AVBench determines audio fidelity in a distributed environment where audio and video streams are not tethered. The “Drag and Scroll” workload determines spatial and temporal variance by emulating user events like mouse click, scroll, and drag.

UEBench

Fig 1. Mouse-click and drag  (UEBench)

As seen in Figure 1, a mouse event is sent to the desktop and the red and black image is dragged across and down the screen.

UEBench-scroll

Fig. 2. Mouse-click and scroll (UEBench)

Similarly, Figure 2 depicts a mouse event sent to the scroll bar of an image that is scrolled up and down.

Better Run Status Reporting

As part of improving the user experience, the UI can track the current stage the View Planner run is in and notifies the user through a color-coded box. The text inside the box is a clickable link that provides a pop-up giving deeper insight about that particular stage.

run-progress-status

Fig. 3. View Planner run status shows the intermediate status of the run

Pre-Check Run Profile for Errors

A “check” button provides users a way to verify the correctness of their run-profile parameters.

check-runprofile

Fig. 4. ‘Check’ button in Run & Reports tab in View Planner UI

 In the past, users needed to optimize the parent VMs used for deploying clients and desktop pools. View Planner 3.5 has automated these optimizations as part of installing the View Planner agent service. The agent installer also comes with a UI that tracks the current stage the installer is in and highlights the results of various installer stages.

Sample Use Cases

Single Host VDI Scaling

Through this release, we have re-affirmed the use case of View Planner as an ideal tool for platform characterization for VDI scenarios.  On a Cisco UCS C240 server, we started with a small number of desktops running the “standard benchmark profile” and increased them until the Group A and Group B numbers exceeded the threshold. The results below demonstrate the scalability of a single UCS C240 server as a platform for VDI deployments.

host-vdi-scaling

Fig. 5. Single server characterization with hosted desktops for CISCO UCS C240

Single Host RDSH Scaling

We followed the best practices prescribed in the VMware Horizon 6 RDSH Performance & Best Practices whitepaper  and set up a number of remote desktop session (RDS) servers that would fully consolidate a single UCS C240 vSphere server. We started with a small number of user sessions per core and then increased them until the Group A and Group B numbers exceeded the threshold level. The results below demonstrate how ViewPlanner can accurately gauge the scalability of a platform (CISCO UCS in this case) when deployed in an RDS scenario

host-RDSH-scaling

Fig. 6. Single server characterization with RDS sessions for CISCO UCS C240

Storage Characterization

View Planner can also be used to characterize storage array performance. The scalability of View Planner 3.5 to drive a workload on thousands of virtual desktops and process the results thereafter makes it an ideal candidate to validate storage array performance at scale. The results below demonstrate scalability of VDI desktops obtained on Pure Storage FA-420 all-flash array. View Planner 3.5 could easily scale to 3000 desktops, as highlighted in the results below.

storage-characterization

Fig. 7. 3000 Desktops QoS results on Pure Storage FA-420 storage array

Custom Applications Scaling

In addition to characterizing platform and storage arrays, the custom app framework can achieve targeted VDI characterization that is application specific. The following results show Visio as an example of a custom app scale study on an RDS deployment with a 4-vCPU, 10GB vRAM Windows 2008 Server.

visio-custom-app

Fig. 8 Visio operation response times with View Planner 3.5 when scaling up application sessions

Other Use Cases

With a plethora of features, supported guest OSes, and configurations, it is no wonder that View Planner is capable to of characterizing multiple VMware solutions and offerings that work in tandem with VMware Horizon. View Planner 3.5 can also be used to evaluate the following features, which are described in more detail in the whitepaper:

  • VMware Virtual SAN
  • VMware Horizon Mirage
  • VMware App Volumes

For more details about new features, use cases, test environment, and results, please refer to the View Planner 3.5 white paper here.

VDI Performance Benchmarking on VMware Virtual SAN 5.5

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In the previous blog series, we presented the VDI performance benchmarking results with VMware Virtual SAN public beta and now we announced the general availability of VMware Virtual SAN 5.5 which is part of VMware vSphere 5.5 U1 GA and VMware Horizon View 5.3.1 which supports Virtual SAN 5.5. In this blog, we present the VDI performance benchmarking results with the Virtual SAN GA bits and highlight the CPU improvements and 16-node scaling results. With Virtual SAN 5.5 with default policy, we could successfully run 1615 heavy VDI users (VDImark) out-of-the-box on a 16-node Virtual SAN cluster and see about 5% more consolidation when compared to Virtual SAN public beta.

virtualsan-view-block-diagram

To simulate the VDI workload, which is typically CPU bound and sensitive to I/O, we use VMware View Planner 3.0.1. We run View Planner and consolidate as many heavy users as we can on a particular cluster configuration while meeting the quality of service (QoS) criteria and we define the score as VDImark. For QoS criteria, View Planner operations are divided into three main groups: (1) Group A for interactive operations, (2) Group B for I/O operations, and (3) Group C for background operations. The score is determined separately for Group A user operations and Group B user operations by calculating the 95th percentile latency of all the operations in a group. The default thresholds are 1.0 second for Group A and 6.0 seconds for Group B. Please refer to the user guide, and the run and reporting guides for more details. The scoring is based on several factors such as the response time of the operations, compliance of the setup and configurations, and other factors.

As discussed in the previous blog, we used the same experimental setup (shown below) where each Virtual SAN host has two disk groups and each disk group has one PCI-e solid-state drive (SSD) of 200GB and six 300GB 15k RPM SAS disks. We use default policy when provisioning the automated linked clones pool with VMware Horizon View for all our experiments.

virtualsan55-setup

CPU Improvements in Virtual SAN 5.5

There were several optimizations done in Virtual SAN 5.5 compared to the previously available public beta version and one of the prominent improvements is the reduction of CPU usage for Virtual SAN. To highlight the CPU improvements, we compare the View Planner score on Virtual SAN 5.5 (vSphere 5.5 U1) and Virtual SAN public beta (vSphere 5.5).  On a 3-node cluster, VDImark (the maximum number of desktop VMs that can run with passing QoS criteria) is obtained for both Virtual SAN 5.5 and Virtual SAN public beta and the results are shown below:

virtualsan55-3node

The results show that with Virtual SAN 5.5, we can scale up to 305 VMs on a 3-node cluster, which is about 5% more consolidation when compared with Virtual SAN public beta. This clearly highlights the new CPU improvements in Virtual SAN 5.5 as a higher number of desktop VMs can be consolidated on each host with a similar user experience.

Linear Scaling in VDI Performance

In the next set of experiments, we continually increase the number of nodes for the Virtual SAN cluster to see how well the VDI performance scales. We collect the VDImark score on 3-node, 5-node, 8-node, 16-node increments, and the result is shown in the chart below.

virtualsan55-scaling

The chart illustrates that there is a linear scaling in the VDImark as we increase the number of nodes for the Virtual SAN cluster. This indicates good performance as the nodes are scaled up. As more nodes are added to the cluster, the number of heavy users that can be added to the workload increases proportionately. In Virtual SAN public beta, a workload of 95 heavy VDI users per host was achieved and now, due to CPU improvements in Virtual SAN 5.5, we are able to achieve 101 to 102 heavy VDI users per host. On a 16-node cluster, a VDImark of 1615 was achieved which accounts for about 101 heavy VDI users per node.

To further illustrate the Group A and Group B response times, we show the average response time of individual operations for these runs for both Group A and Group B, as follows.

virtualsan55-groupA

As seen in the figure above, the average response times of the most interactive operations are less than one second, which is needed to provide a good end-user experience. If we look all the way up to 16 nodes, we don’t see much variance in the response times, and they almost remain constant when scaling up. This clearly illustrates that, as we scale the number of VMs in larger nodes of a Virtual SAN cluster, the user experience doesn’t degrade and scales nicely.

virtualsan55-groupB

Group B is more sensitive to I/O and CPU usage than Group A, so the resulting response times are more important. The above figure shows how VDI performance scales in Virtual SAN. It is evident from the chart that there is not much difference in the response times as the number of VMs are increased from 305 VMs on a 3-node cluster to 1615 VMs on a 16-node cluster. Hence, storage-sensitive VDI operations also scale well as we scale the Virtual SAN nodes from 3 to 16.

To summarize, the test results in this blog show:

  • 5% more VMs can be consolidated on a 3-node Virtual SAN cluster
  • When adding more nodes to the Virtual SAN cluster, the number of heavy users supported increases proportionately (linear scaling)
  • The response times of common user operations (such as opening and saving files, watching a video, and browsing the Web) remain fairly constant as more nodes with more VMs are added.

To see the previous blogs on the VDI benchmarking with Virtual SAN public beta, check the links below:

VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 3

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In part 1 and part 2 of the VDI/VSAN benchmarking blog series, we presented the VDI benchmark results on VSAN for 3-node, 5-node, 7-node, and 8-node cluster configurations. In this blog, we compare the VDI benchmarking performance of VSAN with an all flash storage array. The intent of this experiment is not to compare the maximum IOPS that you can achieve on these storage solutions; instead, we show how VSAN scales as we add more heavy VDI users. We found that VSAN can support a similar number of users as that of an all flash array even though VSAN is using host resources.

The characteristic of VDI workload is that they are CPU bound, but sensitive to I/O which makes View Planner a natural fit for this comparative study. We use VMware View Planner 3.0 for both VSAN and all flash SAN and consolidate as many heavy users as much we can on a particular cluster configuration while meeting the quality of service (QoS) criteria. Then, we find the difference in the number of users we can support before we run out of CPU, because I/O is not a bottleneck here. Since VSAN runs in the kernel and uses CPU on the host for its operation, we find that the CPU usage is quite minimal, and we see no more than a 5% consolidation difference for a heavy user run on VSAN compared to the all flash array.

As discussed in the previous blog, we used the same experimental setup where each VSAN host has two disk groups and each disk group has one PCI-e solid-state drive (SSD) of 200GB and six 300GB 15k RPM SAS disks. We built a 7-node and a 8-node cluster and ran View Planner to get the VDImark™ score for both VSAN and the all flash array. VDImark signifies the number of heavy users you can successfully run and meet the QoS criteria for a system under test. The VDImark for both VSAN and all flash array is shown in the following figure.

View Planner QoS (VDImark)

 

 From the above chart, we see that VSAN can consolidate 677 heavy users (VDImark) for 7-node and 767 heavy users for 8-node cluster. When compared to the all flash array, we don’t see more than 5% difference in the user consolidation. To further illustrate the Group-A and Group-B response times, we show the average response time of individual operations for these runs for both Group-A and Group-B, as follows.

Group-A Response Times

As seen in the figure above for both VSAN and the all flash array, the average response times of the most interactive operations are less than one second, which is needed to provide a good end-user experience.  Similar to the user consolidation, the response time of Group-A operations in VSAN is similar to what we saw with the all flash array.

Group-B Response Times

Group-B operations are sensitive to both CPU and IO and 95% should be less than six seconds to meet the QoS criteria. From the above figure, we see that the average response time for most of the operations is within the threshold and we see similar response time in VSAN when compared to the all flash array.

To see other parts on the VDI/VSAN benchmarking blog series, check the links below:
VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 1
VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 2
VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 3

 

VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 2

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In part 1, we presented the VDI benchmark results on VSAN for 3-node and 7-node configurations. In this blog, we update the results for 5-node and 8-node VSAN configurations and show how VSAN scales for these configurations.

The View Planner benchmark was run again to find the VDImark for different numbers of nodes (5 and 8 nodes) in a VSAN cluster as described in the previous blog and the results are shown in the following figure.

View Planner QoS (VDImark™)

 

In the 5-node cluster, a VDImark score of 473 was achieved and for the 8-node cluster, a VDImark score of 767 was achieved. These results are similar to the ones we saw on the 3-node and 7-node cluster earlier (about 95 VMs per host). So, there is nice scaling in terms of maximum VMs supported as the numbers of nodes were increased in the VSAN from 3 to 8.

To further illustrate the Group-A and Group-B response times, we show the average response time of individual operations for these runs for both Group-A and Group-B, as follows.

Group-A Response Times

As seen in the figure above, the average response times of the most interactive operations are less than one second, which is needed to provide a good end-user experience. If we look at the new results for 5-node and 8-node VSAN, we see that for most of the operations, the response time mostly remains the same across different node configurations.

Group-B Response Times

Since Group-B is more sensitive to I/O and CPU usage, the above chart for Group-B operations is more important to see how View Planner scales. The chart shows that there is not much difference in the response times as the number of VMs were increased from 286 VMs on a 3-node cluster to 767 VMs on an 8-node cluster. Hence, storage-sensitive VDI operations also scale well as we scale the VSAN nodes from 3 to 8 and user experience expectations are met.

To see other parts on the VDI/VSAN benchmarking blog series, check the links below:
VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 1
VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 2
VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 3