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© 2011 VCE Company, LLC. All rights reserved. 1

VBLOCK™ SOLUTION FOR

KNOWLEDGE WORKER

ENVIRONMENTS WITH VMWARE VIEW

4.5


Table of Contents

Purpose ............................................................................................................................................... 4

Audience .............................................................................................................................................. 4

Scope ................................................................................................................................................... 4

Solution purpose .................................................................................................................................. 4

Business Challenge ............................................................................................................................. 5

Technology Solution ............................................................................................................................ 5

Solution Architecture ........................................................................................................................... 6

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 6

Vblock Series 700 MX Infrastructure Platform ................................................................................ 6

VMware View 4.5 Architecture ............................................................................................................ 7

Validation and Workload Characterization .......................................................................................... 8

Test Harness ................................................................................................................................... 8

User Profile .................................................................................................................................... 10

Validation Results .............................................................................................................................. 11

Application response times ........................................................................................................... 11

vSphere Server Utilization ................................................................................................................. 13

CPU Utilization .............................................................................................................................. 13

Memory Utilization ......................................................................................................................... 13

Storage Metrics.................................................................................................................................. 15

VMAX Front End IOPS .................................................................................................................. 15

Backend Storage ........................................................................................................................... 18

Scaling Considerations ...................................................................................................................... 22

Key Findings ...................................................................................................................................... 22

Additional Considerations .................................................................................................................. 23

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 23

References ........................................................................................................................................ 24


Appendix ............................................................................................................................................ 25

1. Characteristics of Knowledge workers ...................................................................................... 25

2. Applications and operations representative of Knowledge Workers......................................... 25

3. Vblock Configuration Details ..................................................................................................... 26

4. Unified Computing System Configuration ................................................................................. 26

5. LAN Cloud Configuration .......................................................................................................... 27

6. Storage Array (EMC Symmetrix VMAX) Configuration ............................................................. 28

7. VMware Virtual Infrastructure.................................................................................................... 30

8 VMware View 4.5 ...................................................................................................................... 31


Purpose

This document describes the Solution Architecture for VMware View 4.5 for managing virtual desktops on the

Vblock™ Infrastructure Platform and specifically the Vblock Series 700 MX.

Audience

This document is intended for use by sales engineers, field consultants, advanced services specialists, and

customers who will configure and deploy a virtual desktop solution, which centralizes data and applications to

provide desktops as a managed service.

Scope

This document provides an overview of a VMware View 4.5 solution on the Vblock 700. Enterprises which have

various types of users such as knowledge workers, task workers and power users, are planning, testing, and

transitioning from a physical desktop/laptop to a virtual desktop environment. The workload characteristics of each

of the users in an enterprise environment differ. The IO profiles required for virtual desktops vary, based on the

type of user, type of use, and types of applications installed onto the virtual desktop. Task workers generate

workloads that tend to be network centric whereas knowledge workers and power users generate workloads that

exercise the compute and storage components of the infrastructure supporting the virtual desktop environment.

This Solution Architecture (SA) explores a virtual desktop solution designed for Knowledge Workers, and builds

on a previously written Solution Architecture (SA) entitled “Vblock Powered Solutions for VMware View 4.5

Reference Architecture”. The previous SA was based on the Vblock 1U, and examined a virtual desktop solution

built for high-end Task Users. Both the previous SA and this architecture utilize and test the B200 M2 blades as

part of the UCS compute, within the Vblock platform.

The following aspects are addressed within this SA:

An architectural overview

Performance validation results

Descriptions of the hardware and software components used in the configurations for the compute,

storage, network, and virtualization pieces of the solution

Information for configuring a Vblock Series 700 for deploying VMware View 4.5

Solution purpose

The VMware View Solution on the Vblock 700 allows:

Consolidation of the desktop environment into one infrastructure behind the firewall, making it easy to

update the operating system, patch applications, ensure compliance, perform application migrations, and

provide support from a central location. The Solution delivers a consistent user experience for employees,

whether they are at corporate locations, conducting travel, or located at a remote office. Using this

solution, less time is spent reacting to regulatory compliance and security issues and more time adding

value to the business.


A simplified desktop environment with pre-integrated, validated units of infrastructure providing virtualized

compute, network, and storage resources. With validated configurations, one can significantly reduce the

time spent on test and development, and therefore time to production, and to revenue generation, is

accelerated.

VCE has built integrated, validated infrastructure packages called Vblock platforms, built from best-of-class

components for compute, network, storage and virtualization, from Cisco, EMC and VMware. These platforms

allow for massive consolidation and rapid provisioning of compute, network, and storage resources on an on-

demand basis.

Business Challenge

The challenges related to traditional desktop deployment and 'day to day' administration, include, lost laptops

containing corporate data, security breaches related to viruses or hackers, to simply ensuring IT resources can

maintain the required service level agreements (SLAs). In addition to the challenges of operational management,

IT must also consider implications of broader system wide issues such as compliance, corporate governance, and

business continuity strategies.

Technology Solution

Enterprises are turning to virtual desktop technologies to address the operational and strategic issues related to

traditional corporate desktop environments. VMware View provides a virtual desktop environment that is secure,

cost effective, and easy to deploy. VMware View also has the capability to meet the demanding needs of the

different types of user profiles whether on the corporate LAN or on the WAN. Combining VMware with the Vblock

platform ensures a high level of user experience, which in turn means acceptance of the virtual desktop

deployment within organizations.


Solution Architecture

Introduction

Individual laptops and desktops are managed as standalone entities residing outside of the datacenter

environment and are not always subject to an organization‟s information security, backup and recovery, and

application usage policies. As enterprises and IT organizations require more secure and efficient means for

managing corporate resources, the need to bring all of these resources under the control of a centralized

datacenter managed by IT becomes of paramount importance. VMware View and Vblock technologies both offer

the capabilities for a centralized datacenter managed by IT. This Solution Architecture (SA) has been designed as

a low impact, cost-effective approach to bring all of these resources under the control of the data center using

VMware, Cisco, and EMC technologies, while providing a rich, single view of an end-user‟s applications and data.

The SA explores how a multi user desktop environment can be virtualized using VMware View, the Vblock

platforms and provides a template that can be used to implement virtual desktop deployments. We present our

findings on the number of desktops that can be scaled with a fully populated Vblock 700, as well as the impact on

user experience, within a virtualized desktop environment.

Vblock Series 700 MX Infrastructure Platform

The building blocks of a Vblock 700 comprise core technologies that together provide template-based

virtualization. Using template-based virtualization to allocate and provision resources, an enterprise can:

Reduce performance bottlenecks and configuration errors through automation of resource configuration

tasks

Enable the rapid deployment of resources using a template, thereby reducing operational expenses and

costs.

Cisco‟s Unified Computing System is the backbone of the virtual infrastructure, providing a data center

architecture for administrators that is easy to use and manage. The platform, optimized for virtual environments, is

designed with open industry standard technologies and aims to reduce TCO and increase business agility. The

system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-

architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multi-chassis platform in which all resources

participate in a unified management domain. The Vblock platforms support the B200, B230, the B250 and the

B400 blades in a chassis. The right choice of blade is dependent on CPU and memory requirements of the

applications hosted on the system.

EMC‟s Symmetrix VMAX and infrastructure technologies provide administrators with the tools to manage and

maintain each end user‟s data and applications in the virtual desktop infrastructure. Using the Symmetrix VMAX

storage array and a host of best-of-breed software applications, administrators have a comprehensive set of

solutions to maintain administrative and security policies. Users of the Symmetrix VMAX will benefit from proven

VMAX 99.999 percent availability and innovative technologies like Enterprise Flash drives, Fully Automated

Storage Tiering (FAST) and Virtual Provisioning. The virtual matrix architecture of the VMAX provides both

scalability and resiliency by ensuring that there is no single point of failure when a component fails.

VMware‟s vSphere 4.1 provides the cloud operating system. The Vblock 700 converged infrastructure adopts the

ESXi Hypervisor Architecture. ESXi has an ultra thin footprint and sets a new bar for security and reliability. With

new memory management and expanded resource pooling capabilities, VMware vSphere 4.1 accelerate the

evolution of datacenters and service providers into cloud computing environments.

PowerPath V/E is included for intelligent path routing and optimized load balancing across all Vblock platforms.

EMC PowerPath/VE enables customers to improve performance, and simplify, standardize and automate path

management across physical and virtual environments.


The following diagram shows the Vblock 700 infrastructure for the VMware View 4.5 Solution Architecture

topology.

Figure 1. The Vblock Series 700 and VMware View 4.5 Solution Architecture

VMware View 4.5 Architecture

Using VMware View‟s virtual desktop infrastructure technologies, which include VMware View Manager‟s

administrative interface, desktops can be quickly and easily provisioned using templates. The technology permits

rapid creation of virtual desktop images from one master image, enabling administrative policies to be set, and

patches and updates applied to virtual desktops in minutes, without affecting user settings, data, or preferences.

The VMware View 4.5 key components are:

View Connection Server: This acts as the broker for client connections. It authenticates the users through

the Active Directory and then directs that request to the virtual desktop.

View Client: Client software for accessing the virtual desktop, from a Windows PC, a Mac PC, or a tablet.

The administrator can configure the client to allow users to select a display protocol such as PcoIP or

RDP.

View Agent: Enables discovery of the virtual machine used as the template, for virtual desktop creation.

Additionally the agent communicates with the View client to provide features such as access to local USB

devices, printing, and monitoring connections.

VMware View Manager: an enterprise-class desktop management solution that streamlines the

management, provisioning, and deployment of virtual desktops. The View Manager is installed at the

same time as the connection server, and allows the user to administer the connection server. For this SA

a single instance of the view manager was used for deploying and managing both the 768 and 1536

desktop environment.


Centralized Virtual Desktops: a method of managing virtual desktops that enables remote sites to access

virtual desktops residing on server hardware in the datacenter

VMware View Composer: an optional tool that uses VMware Linked Clone technology employing a master

image to rapidly create desktop images that share virtual disks. This conserves disk space and

streamlines management.

The following figure illustrates the VMware View physical architecture.

Figure 2. VMware View Architecture

Validation and Workload Characterization

The “Test Harness” describes the environment, the choice of tools used for validation, and the procedures used

for the workload characterization. The “User Profile” describes the end user workload environment and simulation

used in the validation. The “Validation Results” presents the results for the ESX host memory and CPU utilization,

and the storage metrics, using both IOPS and Response time.

Test Harness

The objective of the validation and workload characterization was to define a workload and run profile for running

virtual desktops on the Vblock 700. The View Planner tool was used. VMware View Planner is a virtual desktop

workload generator and sizing tool that enables the measurement of the performance characteristics of the

various components of the VDI deployment such as ESX servers, virtual desktops and the backend storage.

There are two steps involved in using View Planner:

1. Define a workload profile – The first step is to define a workload where the user can specify the applications

that need to run. These applications can range from simple applications such as a web browser to applications


such as Microsoft Excel, Word etc. For this SA a list of applications and operations that are representative of a

knowledge worker were chosen1. In addition to defining the applications to run, the user also needs to define the

number of iterations that the defined workload needs to process along with a „think-time‟. This is the time between

various operations; examples of operations are editing a document or closing a web browser. These two

definitions together form the workload profile as shown in the figure below.

2. Define a Run Profile – The second step of the procedure is to create a Run Profile that is used to associate

the workload profile created in the previous step with a set of VM‟s that will execute the defined workload. The

following parameters were specified when creating the Run Profile:

Number of VM‟s – Number of VM‟s to run the workload

Run Type – The run type can be Local, Remote or Passive. The Local run type runs the workload locally

on the virtual desktop. The Remote run type executes the workload through a client such as a physical

desktop connected to a virtual desktop. The Passive run type runs the workload on several virtual

desktops using a single physical or virtual desktop client.

Display protocol – The display protocol can be specified as either RDP or PCOIP and is associated with

a set of Active directory groups. Each active directory group consists of a set of users on the VM‟s.

1 Appendix, 2: Applications and operations representative of Knowledge Workers.


User Profile

In the context of this Solution Architecture a virtual desktop user is assumed to a be high-end knowledge worker

whose characteristics are described in the appendix2. Each virtual desktop is equipped to run a workload that

simulates typical user behavior, using an application set commonly found and used across a broad array of

desktop environments. Each virtual desktop user was created on a 64-bit Windows 7 desktop with 2 GB of RAM.

The View Planner workload profile was defined as an application set, which consisted of Microsoft Office 2007

applications – MS Word (Document editing), MS Outlook (Email), MS PowerPoint (Presentations) and MS Excel

(Spreadsheets) and Adobe Acrobat Reader, Internet Explorer, WinZip, Mozilla Firefox and Windows Media

Player. The think time for this workload was defined to be 20 seconds and the number of iterations was defined as

8. Based on the think time and the words per minute used for this validation, this workload can be considered

equivalent to that of a high-end knowledge worker.

Two workloads were run

768 desktop users on one UCS chassis and other common hardware, and

1536 desktop users on two UCS chassis of the same kind and other common hardware.

The later workload was executed to show the linear scaling capabilities of the Vblock 700. The hardware is

described in detail in the appendix section of this document3.

2 Appendix, 1: Characteristics of Knowledge Workers.

3 Appendix, 3: Vblock configuration details.


This SA presents results of testing 768 desktop users per chassis of UCS blades. The UCS B-series blade

chassis used in this testing and validation effort is capable of supporting 8 half-width blade servers at full capacity.

Each blade had two 10G converged network adapters to carry network and storage data. Each chassis was

populated with eight B200-M2 blades running the Intel Xeon 5600 CPU chipset and 96 Gb of RAM. The eight

blades in each chassis were configured as a VMware HA cluster managed by a single VMware vCenter 4.1

server. The virtual desktops were hosted on datastores, which were mapped to LUN‟s on the Symmetrix VMAX

storage array.

The Symmetrix VMAX system was setup so that the configuration can scale with the number of desktops. For the

768 desktop configurations, 4 VMAX front-end ports were used along with a cache partition of 25% and 48

backend Fibre Channel 450GB disks. For the 1536 desktop configuration, 4 VMAX front-end ports were used

along with a cache partition of 50% and 96 backend Fibre Channel 450GB disks.

This testing and validation effort employed two VMware View desktop pools4. Each desktop pool consisted of 768

desktops and was deployed on a single UCS chassis consisting of 8 blade servers. The validation infrastructure

fits the profile of a small to medium-scale VMware View deployment. For this testing, 12 to 24 datastores5 (12

datastores for 768 desktops and 24 datastores for 1536 desktops) were created and used to store the Windows 7-

64bit linked clones. All of the linked clones were created from the same parent virtual machine. This configuration

resulted in 64 VMs on each datastore as per VMware‟s best practice recommendation.

A separate cluster consisting of two ESX hosts6 was used to host the common infrastructure components, such

as Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and VMware View Manager, needed for an enterprise desktop environment,.

Each desktop infrastructure service was implemented as a virtual machine running Windows 2008 R2. The

infrastructure cluster also hosted load clients (also known as "witness" clients). These witness clients had the

View Client 4.1 installed in a Windows XP VM. An automated approach was used to launch a View client on each

witness VM and then establish a session with a corresponding Windows 7 desktop. This closely simulates an

actual deployment of View 4.5 within an enterprise.

Validation Results

The most critical metric in a virtual desktop validation is the end user application response time. In this envelope

testing, the system was optimized such that the end user response time for any application activity was less than

3 seconds. As expected, when the number of users was increased by adding an additional blade the application

response time increased only marginally. The validation effort also focused on ensuring that the backend storage

array response time was lower than 1 ms, in order to ensure exceptional I/O performance characteristics. The

CPU and memory characteristics provide information on the behavior of a representative blade used in the

validation.

Application response times

The overall application response times as measured by the open and close times of the various MS Office

applications are shown in the charts below. When 768 desktop sessions were hosted on the UCS chassis, it

meant the 96 Windows 7 desktops were running the end user simulation workload on each blade in the chassis.

Similarly, the 1536 desktop sessions show the response time characteristics when the number of Windows 7

desktops running on each blade remained the same due to the addition of another UCS Chassis. The increased

load on the front end ports of the storage array resulted in increasing the application response time as illustrated

4 Appendix, 8b: Virtual desktop pools.

5 Appendix, 7c: Virtual Infrastructure - Datastores.

6 Appendix, 7a: Virtual Infrastructure – VMware Vsphere ESX/ESXi server.


by the charts in the figures below. The average response times increased by an average 15% when the number

of desktops increases from 768 to 1536.

Figure 3. Application response time with 768 users

Figure 4. Application response time with 1536 users


vSphere Server Utilization

The charts below show the resource utilization of one representative blade server during the steady state. Similar

characteristics were observed on the remaining blades of the test harness.

CPU Utilization

Figure 5 illustrates the CPU utilization of a representative ESX server. Each server hosted 96 user desktops. It is

evident from these figures that the CPU utilization is high and close to 95% in both cases (768 users and 1536

users). It is worthwhile to note that the high CPU utilization is due to the fact that the ESX servers are seeing a

stable workload from many users who are all running similar types of applications, due to the workloads generated

by View Planner. The workload generation tool, View Planner generates stable workloads from multiple

applications simultaneously, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Windows Media Player etc.

Figure 5. CPU Utilization

Memory Utilization

Figure 6 illustrates the memory utilization of a representative ESX server from the cluster hosting the virtual

desktops. Each UCS blade was configured with 96 GB of physical RAM. With each blade running 96 desktop

sessions, respectively, memory is being over-committed. ESX allows for the over-commitment by using

techniques such as page sharing, ballooning, and swapping to disk. All of the above memory over-commitment

techniques were observed during the testing and validation effort. Ballooning and swapping activity were observed

in each test case and were found to be the same as the desktop environment scaled from 768 desktops on one

UCS chassis to 1536 desktops on two UCS Chassis. Although the ballooning of memory appears to be very high

in the above figures, architects should not be worried that this is a problem. User experience in desktop

environments is affected only if the swapping activity is high and in our test environment, the swapping activity

was low, and there was no degradation in perceived user experience.


Figure 6. Memory Utilization


Storage Metrics

VMAX Front End IOPS

Figures 9-14 plot the Symmetrix VMAX front-end IO characteristics with 768 and 1536 users. Figures 15-18

provide storage characteristics on the backend directors and disks of the array.

Front End Ops/sec Minimum Average Maximum (Peak IOPs / Activity)7

768 Desktops 134 573 1651

1536 Desktops 258 1250 7640

Figure 7. Symmetrix VMAX Front End IOPS (4 Front End Ports) with 768 users8

7 The maximum number within the table represents the IOPs experienced during peak activity (boot-storm) on the FE ports of the VMAX. The above and proceeding graphs show the maximum IOPs experienced on all FE ports during the desktop „steady‟ state.

8 The graph displays the IOPs on each VMAX FE port (see Legend) during the desktop „steady‟ state.

15% Front End Busy


Figure 8. Symmetrix VMAX Front End %Busy for 768 Users

Figure 9. Symmetrix VMAX Front End Throughput for 768 Users


Figure 10. Symmetrix VMAX Front End IOPS with 1536 Users

Figure 11. Symmetrix VMAX Front End %Busy for 1536 Users

25% Front End Busy


Figure 12. Symmetrix VMAX Front End Throughput for 1536 Users

Backend Storage

The charts below show the corresponding statistics from the backend of the Symmetrix VMAX storage array. It

can be clearly seen that as the number of virtual desktops is scaled from 768 to 1536, the backend disk statistics

scale almost linearly – the backend IO‟s increase about 80% when the number of desktops is increased from 768

to 1536 while the %disk busy remains the same at about 35%. This is due to more disks were added when the

environment was scaled from 768 to 1536 desktops.


Figure 13. Symmetrix VMAX Backend IOPS for 768 users

Figure 14. Symmetrix VMAX Backend %Busy (Average) for 768 users

35% Disk busy


Figure 15. Symmetrix VMAX Backend IOPS for 1536 users

Figure 16. Symmetrix VMAX Backend Disk %Busy (Average) for 1536 users

The steady state IOPs on the Symmetrix VMAX front-end ports are approximately 573 for 768 users and 1250 for

1536 users. The utilization (%busy) of the front-end ports is an average of 15% for 768 users and 25% for 1536

users. It is important to note that the front-end utilization and IOPS increase significantly when all the desktops are

35% Disk busy


booted at the same time (boot storm event). The back end IOPS scale linearly as the number of desktops double

while the disk utilization remains almost the same. This is due to 48 additional disks were added when the desktop

environment was scaled from 768 to 1536 desktops. From the above charts, it is clear that as the environment is

scaled from 768 desktops to 1536 desktops, by adding a new UCS chassis and storage resources, the IOPS and

other storage operations on the Symmetrix VMAX system scale linearly.


Scaling Considerations

In this SA we have seen that virtual desktop environments can be scaled by either scaling the Vblock platform by

adding additional UCS blades and VMAX engines or using the next generation of UCS blades which offer better

performance characteristics. One of the goals of virtualizing a physical desktop/laptop environment is to provide

an optimal user experience. The user experience in a virtual desktop environment is a function of the performance

of the server on which the virtual machines are running and the performance of the storage IO subsystem.

Further, the performance of a server depends on the bandwidth supported in its CPU and memory as well the

concurrency of the applications that are running on it. Virtualized desktop environments have a mix of applications

with varying degrees of concurrency. For such environments the number of users that a single blade can support

will increase.

Key Findings

Our findings indicate that a fully populated Vblock 700 with Symmetrix VMAX containing four ports on the front

end and supporting up to 24 Datastores on the backend and two chassis of UCS blades can support

approximately 1536 Windows 7 virtual desktop users with 100% concurrency (All users are generating IO‟s with

their workloads at the same time).

The test results demonstrated, as expected, that CPU utilization scales linearly as additional users are

added with an additional chassis and additional storage resources.

These tests were performed with Windows-7 desktop VMs configured with 2 GB of RAM, which is the

high-end configuration for a virtual desktop. As such, memory resources are over-committed and there is

ballooning and swapping activity on each vSphere host.

From a practical standpoint, a typical enterprise desktop deployment will see a mixture of desktop

operating systems, each configured differently. As such, a lower CPU and memory utilization can be

expected in such deployments.

The storage architecture utilized during this validation9 effort leveraged advanced features of the

Symmetrix VMAX array. These features allows for capacity and performance being available for

secondary storage capabilities including backups, replication and maintenance.

The Vblock platform provides flexibility at the hardware layer by allowing a choice of CPU and memory

configurations that can benefit the underlying virtual desktop infrastructure.

The Vblock 700 platform with VMAX storage is thus an ideal platform for running virtualized desktops and

provides operational efficiencies that will help drive down TCO and increase ROI.

The results above demonstrate that a Vblock 700 with 2 UCS chassis, 4 front end VMAX ports and 96 disks

is capable of running 1536 Windows 7 desktop sessions running the knowledge worker user profile workload

with View Planner. Scaling up to 3072 desktops can be achieved by adding 2 more UCS chassis along with

4 more front end ports and 96 more disks. With a single engine Symmetrix VMAX one can implement a

virtual desktop environment of 3000 desktops. Further scaling can be achieved by adding more VMAX

engines and UCS Chassis. A fully configured Vblock 700 with 8 UCS chassis and 6 VMAX engines can

support up to 6144 concurrent desktops. This is based on the assumption that each B200 M2 blade in the

UCS chassis can support 96 desktops/users with 100% concurrency and applications that have high IO

requirements. If further scaling is desired on a single blade in the chassis, then architects should consider

using the next generation B230 blades, which have the next generation Intel Westmere CPU as well as

expanded memory.

9 Appendix, 6: Storage Array configuration.


If the level of concurrency is changed, for example only 80% users may be concurrent in an enterprise

environment due to geographic location of users, or if many users run applications that do not have high

requirements on the disk IO subsystem, then an even higher number of desktops can be supported. It

should be noted that the 96 desktops per UCS blade (B200 M2) and by extension 6144 desktops on a fully

populated Vblock 700 is a limiting/maximum value with 100% concurrency. Knowledge workers who have

high expectations from the disk IO subsystem, and this solution will not accommodate any failures such as a

blade failure or bursts of IO‟s from a few desktops in the architecture. To accommodate component failures

and bursts of IO activity from a few desktops in the deployment, architects should insure that the Vblock 700

is provisioned appropriately and not to the limits mentioned in this paper.

As discussed earlier, architects should note that if the level of concurrency or the demands on the disk IO

subsystem is reduced, each blade could support a higher number of desktops. All these considerations

should be part of the architecture for a virtual desktop deployment.

Additional Considerations

In any virtual desktop deployment, data center services such as backup, recovery, security and business

continuity aspects need to be considered. These considerations may impose additional restrictions on scalability

and performance. VCE provides in-depth discussions on solutions that address these use cases.

Conclusion

The SA for VMware View 4.5 powered on Vblock 700 enables organizations to quickly, and predictably, deploy10

centrally managed, secure, server-hosted virtual desktops. The VCE Vblock 700 validated infrastructure

environment is a key enabler because the compute, network, and storage environments are tightly coupled, which

in turn drives IT simplicity and greatly eases manageability. The technical validation of VMware 4.5 on Vblock 700

confirms the capability to host a large number of virtual desktops running knowledge worker type workloads, with

a high degree of concurrency that is characteristic of large enterprise environments.

10 Appendix, 5: LAN Cloud configuration.


References

Workload Considerations for Virtual Desktop Reference Architectures

http://vmware.com/go/view4rawc

VMware View Reference Architecture

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1084

VMware View

http://www.vmware.com/products/view/

VMware vSphere 4

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/

VMware vSphere 4 Guidance for Modifying vSphere‟s Fairness/Throughput Balance

Further tuning of the Intel Xeon processors is possible to reduce high CPU utilization. Setting the fairness CPU

algorithm can drop the CPU utilization by up to 15%. The following KB article provides guidance on setting the

CPU optimization parameter.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1020233&sliceI

d=1&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=130531572&stateId=0%200%20130535567

Cisco UCS

http://www.cisco.com/go/unifiedcomputing

Cisco Data Center Solutions

http://www.cisco.com/go/datacenter

Cisco Validated Designs

http://www.cisco.com/go/designzone

EMC Symmetrix VMAX Family

http://www.emc.com/products/family/symmetrix-family.htm

EMC PowerPath/VE

http://www.emc.com/products/detail/software/powerpath-ve.htm

http://vmware.com/go/view4rawc

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1084

http://www.vmware.com/products/view/

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1020233&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=130531572&stateId=0%200%20130535567

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1020233&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=130531572&stateId=0%200%20130535567

http://www.cisco.com/go/unifiedcomputing

http://www.cisco.com/go/datacenter

http://www.cisco.com/go/designzone

http://www.emc.com/products/family/symmetrix-family.htm

http://www.emc.com/products/detail/software/powerpath-ve.htm


Appendix

The appendix is included in this document to provide the characteristics of knowledge worker, configuration,

networking, and storage details.

1. Characteristics of Knowledge workers

The table below outlines the various characteristics of a knowledge worker type user who is the primary user type

for the virtual desktop environment described in this paper

Characteristic Knowledge Worker

CPU (Cumulative) of moment of decline 60-65%

I/O Pattern (Cumulative) R/W 40/60

IOPS (Per User) Range 7-59

IOPS (Per User) Average 22

Block Size Average 16K

Block Size Standard Deviation 4K

Application Mix (Number of Apps) 15+

Number of Apps Open Concurrently Many

Sizing Difficult High

2. Applications and operations representative of Knowledge Workers

The following chart depicts the applications and operations on them performed by a knowledge worker.


Since the operations in a desktop typically happen at discrete intervals of time, often in bursts that can consume

lot of CPU cycles and memory, it is desirable not have all desktops to execute the same sequence of operations

as it is not representative of a typical VDI deployment and can cause resource over commitment. To avoid

synchronized swimming among desktops, view planner randomizes the execution sequence in each desktop so

that they are doing different things at any given instant of time and the load is evenly spread out..

The following chart represents the sequence of workloads among a set of desktops.

3. Vblock Configuration Details

This section provides the VDI environment configuration details. Vblock 700 with Symmetrix VMAX Storage

contains the following components:

a. Hardware

Cisco Unified Computing System with B200 M2 Series Blades with 3.33 GHz Intel Xeon 6 core CPU,

96GB RAM

Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switch

EMC Symmetrix VMAX Storage

b. Software

Cisco UCS Manager

EMC Symmetrix Management Console

EMC Powerpath/VE

VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1

VMware vCenter Server

VMware View 4.5

VMware View Planner

Required in addition to the above components is an environment with Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and

Microsoft Exchange. The Microsoft threat management gateway was used as a proxy server.

4. Unified Computing System Configuration

Following are the configuration details of the Service Profiles Template used for creating Service Profiles for

deploying VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1.


Assumptions: UIM has been pre configured on the Vblock platform according to the installation guide.

5. LAN Cloud Configuration

a. VLANs

The following figure shows the list of VLANs configured in the Vblock and usable by UIM. The VLan16 VLAN is

used for accessing the Internet and View Clients. The VLan20 VLAN is used for the vMotion network.

Figure 17. VLANs global to the Vblock

b. WWN Pools

Verify that the WWN pool is defined in UIM

Figure 18. UIM WWN definitions

c. SAN Pin Group

One SAN Pin group was created in the UCS manager using the port channels configured to segregate traffic for a

2 chassis configuration. To scale, create one more SAN Pin group and segregate traffic between the remaining

chassis. This configuration is done to optimize traffic and is transparent to UIM.


6. Storage Array (EMC Symmetrix VMAX) Configuration

A single engine Symmetrix VMAX system in the Vblock was used for testing the virtual desktop deployment. The

ESX clusters, which contained hosts from a single chassis, were mapped to 4 front-end ports of the VMAX system

through the pool definition. All the desktops on the ESX clusters were laid out on Fibre Channel disks at the array

back-end. These were presented as virtually provisioned LUN‟s to the front-end of the Symmetrix VMAX system,

and then presented to UIM as a storage pool.

a. Symmetrix VMAX LUN’s

Storage used for the datastores is provisioned automatically from UIM on the Vblock with the Symmetrix VMAX

storage system. The defined storage pools for UIM on the VMax are used by UIM to automatically provision

datastores for vCenter.


b. Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning Pool and LUN’s

A single virtual provisioning pool named „vcevdipool‟ was created from Fibre Channel Back End storage devices,

which were FC disks of 15K RPM 450GB capacity. The thin pool consisted of 48 data devices for the 768 desktop

deployment and 96 data devices for the 1536 desktop deployment. The pool was used for storing the linked clone

user desktops. For testing a configuration of 1536 user desktops, 24 FC LUN‟s were created for use by UIM using

the vcevdipool with RAID5 protection. The details of the virtual provisioning pool and the LUN‟s are shown below.

c. Symmetrix VMAX (VMware Datastores)

A second pool was created for use in UIM to provide the Datastore capacity. Below is a picture outlining the

details from a vCenter perspective.


7. VMware Virtual Infrastructure

a. VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi Server

In this VDI environment, there are a total of 8 ESX servers dedicated for testing 768 Virtual Desktops and there

are 16 ESX servers dedicated for testing 1536 Virtual Desktops. Additionally, there are 2 more ESX servers for

managing the entire VDI environment. The VMware View connection server insures that all the desktops are

distributed equally amongst the 8 ESX servers in the cluster. The following figure shows two ESXi Clusters. „Infra‟

is used for hosting management components required for the VDI deployment and VBLOCK-2A is used for Virtual

Desktops.

b. VMware vSphere Advanced Parameters

No specific advanced parameters were tuned for this testing. All the VAAI parameters were left turned on as that

is the default.

c. Datastores

There are a total of 24 datastores for (1-24) for storing the linked Clones. The size of each datastore is 939 GB.

The datastore VCE-VDI-Infrastructure is used specifically to store Gold Images of Windows 7 Desktops and the

swap files for all the virtual machines


8 VMware View 4.5

In this environment, a single view connection server was used to handle 1536 Virtual Desktops. The following

figure shows vCenter Server Integration with VMware View 4.5. It also shows that VMware Composer is enabled.

The following figure shows that the instance of View Manager which is in a healthy state. Tunnelling is disabled on

the connection server.


In addition, the event database was configured for logging all the events occurring. The following figure shows the

configuration details.

a. Virtual Desktop Pools

For testing the virtual desktop environment, 2 Desktop pools were created to accommodate 1536 users. For ease

of scaling, 2 pools of 768. The test was run with 1 pool of 768 desktops on a single UCS chassis and 2 pools with

a total of 1536 desktops. The following figure shows the list of pools.


ABOUT VCE

VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment Company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel,

accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models that dramatically reduce the

cost of IT while improving time to market for our customers. VCE, through the Vblock platform, delivers the industry's first

completely integrated IT offering with end-to-end vendor accountability. VCE's prepackaged solutions are available

through an extensive partner network, and cover horizontal applications, vertical industry offerings, and application

development environments, allowing customers to focus on business innovation instead of integrating, validating and

managing IT infrastructure.

For more information, go to www.vce.com.

Copyright © 2011 VCE Company, LLC. All rights reserved. Vblock and the VCE logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of VCE Company, LLC. and/or its affiliates in the United States or other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

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