White Papers

BP1018 Sizing and Best Practices for Citrix XenDesktop with Dell EqualLogic Storage 21
Login VSI workload was used to simulate the task worker workload profile and detailed storage and
infrastructure performance metrics were captured. All virtual desktops were pre-booted before the
Login VSI workload started.
Some of the key performance metrics are analyzed below.
Volume level IOPS
We observed around 1100 to 1200 IOPS on each volume and both average read and write latencies
were well below 2 ms. The total IOPS and the disk latency observed on one of the write cache
volumes is shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8 Total IOPS and latency per volume
SAN HQ charts for the other three volumes are not included here, but similar performance was
observed on the other three volumes.
Aggregate member level IOPS
The total IOPS on the PS6010XVS array during steady state when all the VMs logged in was around
4500 which is around 7.3 IOPS per VM as shown in Figure 9. There was some read I/O activity during
the beginning of the test, but it was not more than 150 to 200 IOPS. Once steady state was reached, it
was only the write IOPS which were generated because of write cache activity on each desktop. The