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Sizing and Best Practices for Deploying VMware View 4.5
on VMware vSphere 4.1 with Dell EqualLogic Storage
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Figure 5: ESX vSwitch Connection Paths
In our configuration we used the software iSCSI initiator provided by the ESX host. To take advantage
of EqualLogic-aware multi-path I/O, the EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) for VMware
vSphere was installed on each ESX host.
3.3 Virtualized Desktop Scaling: VM Host Limits on Server and Storage
We ran a series of scale-up tests using the RAWC simulation tool to determine the maximum number
of virtual desktop VMs that we could host on a single PowerEdge M610 server used in our View Client
ESX clusters. We used optimal CPU, memory, network bandwidth utilization, network TCP
retransmission and disk IOPS latency as the criteria for this test. The results indicated that we could
optimally host up to 78 virtual desktop VMs per M610 ESX server. We could have scaled the number of
VMs per ESX server to a higher level than this. However, we took a conservative strategy by including
minimal or no memory ballooning as part of the criteria. Our primary focus in this case was to test
scaling of EqualLogic SANs in a VDI deployment while not hitting any server performance limits during
the tests. To determine the maximum number of View Client VMs the EqualLogic SAN could host, we
used the following performance criteria:
Note: For detailed information on using the EqualLogic Multipathing Extension
Module, see the following publication:

Configuring and Installing the EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module for
VMware vSphere 4.1 and PS Series SANs
:
http://www.equallogic.com/resourcecenter/assetview.aspx?id=9823