Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 3
Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server:
Uncompromised virtual desktop performance
0
1,000
2,000
3,000
4,000
5,000
6,000
6 19 29 39 49 59 69 79 89 99 109 119 130 141 151 162 173 184
Response time (ms)
Number of users
Response times for virtual desktops on a single Cisco UCS
B200 M3 Blade Server (VSImax=182)
Average Response VSI Index Average
Figure 1: Average virtual desktop response times at various numbers of virtual desktops on the Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server.
To initiate our test, we enabled our Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 pool to start up all Windows 7
VMs and reach an idle state. We monitored our test bed during the startup and perceived no
bottlenecks in server CPU, network, or storage I/O at the Citrix XenDesktop default startup rate
of 10 actions per minute. When the VMs were idle, we started Login VSI testing. Figure 2 shows
the processor utilization throughout the test. With 191 simultaneous users, 182 of which
achieved an acceptable response time as determined by the Login VSI 3.0 benchmark, nearly all
16 processor cores were at 100 percent utilization. The graph line represents the average
utilization across all 16 cores (32 threads) thought out the boot, idle, and testing phases. When
the test was complete, all virtual desktops began to log off.
Login VSImax = 182
Dynamic VSImax = 4,152
Baseline = 921