Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 9
Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server:
Uncompromised virtual desktop performance
 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
and applies the formula Baseline x 125% +3000, when the VSI index is higher than the dynamic
baseline then dynamic VSI Max is achieved. In our testing, Dynamic VSI Max was calculated to be
186 sessions.
It is important to note that variations in hypervisor, application, guest OS, and VDI
settings can have a significant impact on expected user density in these tests. Tuning frames per
second, image compression, screen resolution, and other user-experience-specific settings can
increase or decrease the number of desktops a system can support. Generally, improving user
experience will decrease the number of supported desktops. It is therefore important to