Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 9
Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server:
Uncompromised virtual desktop performance
indicative of a typical “knowledge worker,” opens and closes the following applications and runs
their respective tasks:
 Microsoft Outlook®: Browsing a message
 Microsoft Word® (TimerDoc): Initiating response timer to see how the program
responds throughout the workload
 Microsoft Internet Explorer® instance one: Maximizing, scrolling, and minimizing
 Microsoft Internet Explorer instance two: Navigating a Web site, maximizing,
and scrolling
 Adobe® Flash® KA movie trailer
 Microsoft Word (UserRead): Reading and typing text, and printing to PDF
 Bullzip: Generating a PDF
 Adobe® Reader®: Reading a PDF
 Microsoft PowerPoint®: Watching a presentation and adding a slide
 Microsoft Excel®: Reading and minimizing
 7-Zip: Saving a ZIP file
Login VSI Version 3.0 (Release 6) benchmarks user experience more effectively than
previous versions of Login VSI because its workloads and what the VSI Index measures more
accurately reflect the tasks actual users perform on their virtual desktops. Reported response
times are higher in Login VSI 3.0 than in Login VSI 2.0 and other previous versions because the
benchmark uses this heavier workload. The Login VSI benchmark mandates the minimum
acceptable response time for the testing.
The Login VSI 3.0 benchmark uses seven operations to determine the VSImax, the
maximum number of users the system can handle before suffering serious degradation in
performance. By using seven operations instead of only two, as earlier versions of Login VSI did,
Login VSI 3.0 better reflects what a user actually experiences. The seven operations are as
follows:
 Copying a new document from the document pool in the home drive
 Starting Microsoft Word
 Starting the File Open dialogue
 Starting the Search and Replace dialogue
 Starting the Print dialogue
 Starting Notepad
 Compressing the document into a ZIP file with 7-zip command line
Login VSI records response times, the time taken to execute a given task, in
milliseconds. Login VSI then reports minimum, average, and maximum response times, as well
as the VSI Index average while performing the workload. The Login VSI Index average is similar
to the average response time, as it averages the maximum and minimum response times, but it
removes 2 percent from the maximum and minimum response time before calculating the
average. VSI max is then calculated in one of two ways, Classic and Dynamic. When the VSI Index
average is higher than the default threshold of 4000ms, Classic VSImax is achieved. Dynamic VSI
max calculates a dynamic threshold based on the average response times of the first 15 sessions