Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 13
Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server:
Uncompromised virtual desktop performance
APPENDIX B – HOW WE TESTED
To determine the number of virtual desktops the server could support, we ran incremental tests increasing the
virtual desktop load until Dynamic VSI Max was reached. The minimum number of sessions required to archive Dynamic
VSI max was 191. When testing 191 virtual desktops, we recorded a Dynamic VSI max of 182. At 190 sessions, the
benchmark did not achieve Dynamic VSI Max. At the end of the test, the processors on the Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade
Server were nearly saturated. We confirmed that no other factors such as storage bottlenecks or memory constraints
were contributing to a loss of performance or decreased response time.
Figure 10 illustrates our test environment: one Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Chassis with one Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade
Server and two Cisco UCS B200 M2 blade servers. The Cisco UCS B200 M2 blade servers with VMware vSphere 5 hosted
all Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 and Login VSI Infrastructure VMs and the Cisco B200 M3 blade server with VMware vSphere 5
hosted all the Citrix XenDesktop virtual desktops. We connected the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Chassis to redundant pair of
Cisco UCS 6248UP Fabric Interconnects. We connected the Fabric Interconnects to a Cisco Nexus™ 5010 switch. We
deployed the three Cisco blade servers via the Cisco UCS Manager. Using Cisco Service Profiles, we assigned a base
firmware level of 2.0(2a) for all server components. For the Cisco B200 M3, we assigned two redundant 20Gb vNICs and
two redundant 4Gb Fibre Channel HBAs. For the Cisco B200 M2, we assigned two redundant 10Gb vNICs and two
redundant 4Gb Fibre Channel HBAs. We hosted all VM storage on an EMC CX 3. We set up our Citrix XenDesktop virtual
desktops using streaming VHDs via Citrix Provisioning Services. Our master image, a Microsoft Windows 7 x 86
Enterprise VM, had one vCPU and 1.5 GB of reserved memory. We configured our Windows 7 guest image with system
defaults and optimized it using Citrix XenConvert.
We used XenDesktop default settings for FPS, compression levels, and image quality. We used the Citrix HDX
monitor to verify that Flash Media Redirection was available during testing.
All Login VSI launchers were virtual machines, to ensure audio rendering we installed Virtual audio cable 4.12 on
each. All desktop session were at a resolution of 1024x768, 32 bit color.
Note that, for its UCS blade servers, Cisco recommends a stateless boot from SAN configuration to ensure
portability. However, for simplicity we installed our vSphere operating system on local disks because it did not affect the
performance testing.
Figure 11 illustrates our logical network layout. We created a vSwitch on each vSphere server and created a
single port group, tagged as vlan100. We connected all virtual desktops, Login VSI launchers, and Citrix XenDesktop
infrastructure to these vSwitches.