VROOM!: VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 2

In part 1, we presented the VDI benchmark results on VSAN for 3-node and 7-node configurations. In this blog, we update the results for 5-node and 8-node VSAN configurations and show how VSAN scales for these configurations.

The View Planner benchmark was run again to find the VDImark for different numbers of nodes (5 and 8 nodes) in a VSAN cluster as described in the previous blog and the results are shown in the following figure.

View Planner QoS (VDImark™)

In the 5-node cluster, a VDImark score of 473 was achieved and for the 8-node cluster, a VDImark score of 767 was achieved. These results are similar to the ones we saw on the 3-node and 7-node cluster earlier (about 95 VMs per host). So, there is nice scaling in terms of maximum VMs supported as the numbers of nodes were increased in the VSAN from 3 to 8.

To further illustrate the Group-A and Group-B response times, we show the average response time of individual operations for these runs for both Group-A and Group-B, as follows.

Group-A Response Times

As seen in the figure above, the average response times of the most interactive operations are less than one second, which is needed to provide a good end-user experience. If we look at the new results for 5-node and 8-node VSAN, we see that for most of the operations, the response time mostly remains the same across different node configurations.

Group-B Response Times

Since Group-B is more sensitive to I/O and CPU usage, the above chart for Group-B operations is more important to see how View Planner scales. The chart shows that there is not much difference in the response times as the number of VMs were increased from 286 VMs on a 3-node cluster to 767 VMs on an 8-node cluster. Hence, storage-sensitive VDI operations also scale well as we scale the VSAN nodes from 3 to 8 and user experience expectations are met.

To see other parts on the VDI/VSAN benchmarking blog series, check the links below:

VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 1

VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 2

VDI Benchmarking Using View Planner on VMware Virtual SAN – Part 3

via VMware Blogs http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2013/11/vdi-benchmarking-using-view-planner-on-vmware-virtual-san-part-2.html