A Principled Technologies test report 2
Cisco UCS B230 M2 Blade Server:
Uncompromised virtual desktop performance
MORE VDI SESSIONS ARE BETTER
Choosing the right combination of hardware and software for your virtual desktop
solution can significantly affect your bottom line. A robust hypervisor, top-of-the-line virtual
desktop software, and a server built on powerful processors with an expansive memory
footprint all work together to ensure you can meet the needs of your employees without your
spending money, space, and time on additional hardware. The greater your virtual desktop
density, the fewer physical servers you need. This reduces your electricity usage and power
costs, and results in a greener datacenter.
We set out to examine such a virtual desktop solution, one that consisted of the
following components:
Cisco Unified Computing System™ (UCS) B230 M2 Blade Server with Intel®
Xeon® processor E7-4870s (Note: In our testing, we used the E7-4870
processors, the functional and performance equivalent of the E7-2870. Cisco
officially supports the 2800 series of Intel Xeon processors for the B230 M2
blade.)
vSphere 5
A VMware View 5 virtual desktop linked clone pool consisting of 175 Microsoft®
Windows® 7 x64 VMs
175 virtual desktops, all provisioned with 1 vCPU and 2 GB of reserved memory
EMC® VNX 5500 storage array
RESPONSE TIME MATTERS
Login VSI measures the total response times of seven typical office operations and from
that calculates the VSI Index and average response times. Completion of these tasks within
4,000 milliseconds makes for an acceptable user experience. Figure 1 shows the VSI index
average and average response times for all active sessions recorded during the test. The Cisco
UCS B230 M2 Blade Server was able to support 175 concurrent virtual desktops without crossing
the response-time threshold. User response time degraded only when all 20 processor cores
were nearly saturated. For details, see Appendix D.
To initiate our test, we enabled our VMware View 5 pool of 175 Windows 7 VMs to start
up and reach a ready state. We monitored our test bed and perceived no bottlenecks in server
CPU, network, or storage I/O at the VMware View default startup rate of five VMs at a time.
See http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-e7-8800-4800-2800-families-vol-1-datasheet.html.
We used 2 GB of RAM because Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit requires it. See http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/system-
requirements.
(82 pages)
(208 pages)
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