Few months ago, we published a Virtual SAN on Cisco UCS Reference Architecture providing guidance on IO benchmarks for server workloads along with design and best practices of implementing Virtual SAN in a Cisco UCS environment. This provides good sizing guidance of your Virtual SAN environment for generic server workloads. As customers look to deploy specific workloads, such as VDI, sizing & performance characteristics tends to differ in nature.
We are now publishing scalability & performance focused Reference Architecture for Horizon 6 based virtual desktops running on Cisco UCS C240-M3 with Virtual SAN as the storage. The test environment is built based on the Cisco UCS VDI Ready Nodes for Virtual SAN. We used VMware View Planner as a VDI benchmarking tool to measure application performance results along with VSAN Observer capturing storage metrics (IOPS and Latency).
Here are the configuration details from the test environment:
Key highlights captured from the RA are:
- Linear scalability is achieved with Virtual SAN as the storage solution on Cisco UCS for hosting View virtual desktops. The reference architecture successfully scaled from 400 desktops on 4 UCS C-240 M3 nodes to 800 desktops on 8 nodes, keeping all aspects of end-user performance consistently acceptable under 15ms disk latency and 3ms application response times.
- Optimal performance is achieved while performing all virtual desktop operations such as refresh, recompose, deploy, power-on and power-off. Times measured for these operations fall within industry measured benchmarks and provide a testimony of the joint solution’s scalability.
- Virtual SAN provides highly available and resilient storage for hosting View virtual desktops. Multiple maintenance and failure scenarios tested provide confidence in the resiliency of the joint solution:
Along with the performance results, the reference architecture provides Cisco UCS and Virtual SAN design and implementation best practices. For more details download the VMware Horizon 6 and VMware Virtual SAN with Cisco UCS Reference Architecture.
