A couple of View (WinXP and Win7) docs to read…

Was with a large customer today (thank you for being an EMC and VMware customer!) discussing their client virtualization project.  They are relatively large scale with several thousand clients deployed.   It hasn’t been perfect, like a lot of client virtualization projects I see – there are bumps.

These fall into common categories:

1. Miss-set expectations about graphics protocol behavior over very high latency, low bandwidth links
2. Like all customers, start with focus on storage GB efficiency ($$ per GB) and as they get going, realizing that it’s much more about IO efficiency ($$ per IO).
3. Struggles with the hard-dollar TCO
4. Impacts of infrastructure outages that were profound and affected their business
5. Struggles – both technical and organizational – with the “the infrastructure is all related… it’s a system, not ‘clients, servers, networks, and storage’ and we’re organized around the silos” problem.  
6. When they have an issue – they have a hard time pinpointing it, and determining what the end-user client experience REALLY is.

None of these have simple, blog-ish answers (though I think I’m going to be doing more and more on this topic) – heck, it was a 3 hour meeting.

BUT – one thing that we discussed is “what sort of IO profile would you expect for a call center?”  My comment was that without any further info (real answer, is “it depends, let’s measure”), it’ was “likely to be in the 10-12 IOps/client range”.   FYI, I typically see kiosk type apps in the 4-8 band, and knowledge workers in the 20-30 band. 

Their comment?   They see 20, and are wondering why there is 10 IOps per client even when no one is logged in….

In general, people underestimate the IO workload that a VDI deployment (using any of the technologies) represents at moderate to large scale.  

But, they also underestimate the positive impact of a few small things, that cost nothing to do….

There are two technical docs I want to draw people’s attention to…  These are on top of (and aligned with) VMware’s excellent documents on this topic here (XP, Win 7)…   These EMC docs cover detail on configuring Win XP and Win 7 clients for Virtual Desktop Use cases with EMC storage.   While focused on View (including data comparing client virtualization and server virtualization workloads) similar best practices apply to Xen/VMware combinations. 

These little things make a big difference – measured minimally in the 5-10% improvement range, but in some cases much, much more (particularly true with the Win 7 case)  

As is often the case, a little bit of know how is worth more than a lot of vendor “you’ve got have feature ____”.   That know-how can save you a lot of $$ and grief.   Note that they refer to VMFS and NTFS alignment – make sure you build that into your template to save yourself pain of re-alignment later.   If you want more on alignment, Vaughn and I covered that in this VMworld 2010 session (content here).

 

Read them, use them.   They are very useful.  Comments welcome!!!

Comments

[Keith Norbie]

Love it. Great stuff!

[Jeramiah Dooley]

I heard a rumor that there was a version of this document for Vista at one point, but it only included one paragraph that mocked people who actually migrated to Vista. Care to comment? ;-)

Good stuff Chad. Thanks!

[Daniel Feller]

Interesting and good suggestions.. Although the settings are good, many won't get you more VMs but they should help you lower iops. I've even seen idle user hitting the system pretty hard. There is a balance though. If u disable the themes and screensavers and other personalization items, then I ask you what is the point in giving users a hosted vm-based desktop. Wouldn't it be better to give them a hosted shared desktop instead?

[Angelo]

Thanks for posting the docs...!