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BP1018 Sizing and Best Practices for Citrix XenDesktop with Dell EqualLogic Storage 19
Figure 6 Total IOPS on vDisk volume
As shown in Figure 6, we observed very minimal READ I/O activity (122 IOPS) on the vDisk volume
during the login storm. Each PVS server had 16 GB of RAM and as a result, most of the data which
needed to be streamed was cached in the server RAM. Once the disk image blocks got cached, further
read requests from virtual desktops were served directly from PVS RAMs which significantly reduced
the storage IOPS later on.
The I/O pattern observed on vDisk was same for all the different test scenarios (Refer to section 5.1).
5.3 CIFS share I/O characteristics
The EqualLogic PS6510E array was used to host the user shares and user profiles of all virtual desktops
through a Windows-based file server. This CIFS share was used to redirect the user data and roaming
profiles of virtual desktops to a centralized location. A single volume with 2 TB of capacity was created
on the PS6510E and this volume was mounted on the file server to host the user profiles and user data
folders for all virtual desktops.
When simulating a steady state workload for the task worker profile using Login VSI with all 630 virtual
desktops, we observed a peak of 300 IOPS and when 1270 desktops were hosted a peak of 600 IOPS
were observed on the PS6510E used for hosting the CIFS share.