VMware has released a paper titled: “VMware Horizon View Large-Scale Reference Architecture“. The paper which contains 30 pages details a reference architecture based on real-world test scenarios, user workloads and infrastructure system configurations. The RA uses the VCE Vblock Specialized System for Extreme Applications, composed of Cisco UCS server blades and EMC XtremIO flash storage, to support a 7,000-user VMware Horizon View 5.2 deployment. Benchmarking was done using the Login VSI Max benchmarking suite.
The paper covers the following topics:
- Executive Summary
- Overview
- VCE Vblock Specialized System for Extreme Applications
- VMware Horizon View
- Storage Components
- Compute and Networking Components
- Workload Generation and Measurement
- Test Results
- Login VSI
- Timing Tests
- Storage Capacity
- System Configurations
- vSphere Cluster Configurations
- Networking Configurations
- Storage Configurations
- vSphere Configurations
- Infrastructure and Management Servers
- Horizon View Configuration
- EMC XtremIO Storage Configurations
Conclusion:
Our test results demonstrate that it is possible to deliver an Ultrabook-quality user experience at scale for every desktop, with headroom for any desktop to burst to thousands of IOPS as required to drive user productivity, thanks to the EMC XtremIO storage platform, which provides considerably higher levels of application performance and lower virtual desktop costs than alternative platforms. The high performance and simplicity of the EMC XtremIO array and the value-added systems integration work provided by VCE as part of the Vblock design contributed significantly to the overall success of the project.