HPE performance white paper—Citrix XenDesktop 7.13 on HPE SimpliVity 380

Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2

Summary of results ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2

Solution preview .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 2

HPE SimpliVity overview .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 2

Test environment configuration.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 3

Hardware configuration ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 4

XenDesktop Hosted Desktop VM configuration ................................................................................................................................................................................... 5

XenDesktop Hosted Shared Desktop VM configuration ............................................................................................................................................................... 5

Datastore configuration ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 5

Performance testing procedures .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 5

Login VSI .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Test results ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Hosted desktops—750 Knowledge Worker users—without compute nodes ........................................................................................................... 7

Hosted desktops—1300 Knowledge Worker users—with compute nodes ................................................................................................................ 7

Hosted shared desktops—800 Office Worker users—without compute nodes ...................................................................................................... 8

Hosted shared desktops—1600 Office Worker users—with compute nodes ........................................................................................................... 8

Analysis of test results from Login VSI ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 9

Summary ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 10

About Login VSI .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. 10

Technical white paper

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Introduction Client virtualization provides customers with a more consistent end-user experience and excellent operational benefits, including security, protection of company data, centralized control and management, increased flexibility, and accessibility for the end-user client platforms. While these advantages are obvious and attractive to many companies, there are challenges to overcome in a cost-effective manner that ensure an excellent end-user experience.

HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure solves many of these challenges by eliminating the redundant IOPS that plague client virtualization environments, eliminating silos of data management, and utilizing built-in data protection and mobility.

This white paper documents the results of the testing led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise to provide evidences of these efficiency gains on Citrix® XenDesktop® hosted and hosted shared desktops. All tests were performed with Citrix Machine Creation Services (MCS) deployed virtual machines, and those tests leveraged Login VSI, the industry-standard load testing solution for virtualized desktop environments. These tests offer insight in to the latest performance results of Citrix XenDesktop 7.13 on HPE OmniStack software version 3.6.2 update 1.

Summary of results The performance testing illustrates the ability of HPE SimpliVity 380 to deliver an excellent end-user experience in client virtualization deployments as the environment scales. Highlights include

1. Performance at scale: Consistent, very low average latency as measured by Login VSI.

2. With 4x HPE SimpliVity 380 nodes, we ran 750 Knowledge Worker users on hosted desktops and 800 Office Worker users on hosted shared desktops.

3. Leveraging compute nodes allowed HPE to scale the solution without breaking the bank—with the same 4x HPE SimpliVity 380 nodes plus four compute nodes, we ran 1300 Knowledge Worker users on hosted desktops and 1600 Office Worker users on hosted shared desktops.

Solution preview Client virtualization initiatives have gained a reputation for being costly, time consuming, difficult to architect, and, worst of all, prone to failure due to poor user experience. When deployed on HPE SimpliVity, many of the common administrative pain points are alleviated while giving business owners confidence that their end users will experience superior desktop performance. HPE SimpliVity delivers client virtualization without compromise, with a strong focus on end-user experience, operational efficiency and economics, and enterprise-level data protection and resiliency.

The following performance tests were conducted to document the performance characteristics of Citrix XenDesktop hosted and hosted shared desktops running on HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure. These results are a sample and are not intended to offer a comprehensive overview of all client virtualization use cases that HPE SimpliVity addresses. Contact HPE sales to discuss how HPE SimpliVity addresses other client virtualization use cases.

HPE SimpliVity overview HPE SimpliVity is a hyperconverged infrastructure solution built for the enterprise. It runs on industry-leading HPE DL380 Gen9 servers to deliver turnkey hyperconverged infrastructure for the software-defined data center. Clustering multiple HPE SimpliVity nodes form a shared resource pool and deliver high availability, mobility, and efficient scaling of performance and capacity.

HPE SimpliVity assimilates all IT infrastructure and services below the hypervisor into a single, scalable 2U building block. Two or more instances of HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged building blocks deployed together form a federation—delivering a massively scalable pool of shared resources.

HPE SimpliVity offers differentiation from other converged infrastructure is in its data virtualization platform, which enables a single shared resource pool across multiple sites and provides highly efficient data storage and mobility. HPE SimpliVity data virtualization platform consists of the HPE SimpliVity data architecture and HPE OmniStack Accelerator Card, both of which enable accelerated data efficiency, global unified management, and built-in data protection.

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Figure 1. HPE SimpliVity overview

Test environment configuration The following tables detail the physical and logical specifications of the environment utilized for these tests. HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure used was deployed in multiple configurations to show performance with and without compute nodes.

The first configuration is without compute nodes. This is a 4+0 deployment with four HPE SimpliVity 380 nodes deployed to a single VMware vSphere® cluster. Each host has two 18-core Intel® Xeon® E5-2697 v4 CPUs and 512 GB of memory.

The second configuration is with compute nodes. This is a 4&4 deployment with four HPE SimpliVity 380 nodes, along with four compute nodes, deployed to a single vSphere cluster. Each HPE SimpliVity node has two 18-core Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 CPUs and 512 GB of memory, while each compute node has two 14-core Intel Xeon E5-2697 v3 CPUs and 384 GB of memory. VMware® Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) mode was set to Haswell to ensure virtual machines could vMotion to any VMware® ESXi™ host within the cluster.

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Figure 2. Compute nodes and HPE SimpliVity 380 nodes

Hosted and hosted shared desktops were deployed. For hosted desktops, we used Windows® 10 LTSB as our operating system. For hosted shared desktops, Windows Server® 2016 was used. As documented by Login VSI for Windows Server 2016 and ProjectVRC.team for Windows 10, both of these newer generation operating systems are much more resource intensive as compared to their predecessors, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 7. As such, these results cannot easily be compared with previous benchmarks.

Hardware configuration Table 1. Hardware specifications

Attribute Specification

HPE SimpliVity 380 nodes 4

Haswell-based compute nodes 4

Compute node attachment rate 1 to 1

HPE SimpliVity 380 per node specifications

Model HPE SimpliVity 380

CPU 2x Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 (18 cores each)

Memory 512 GB

Disk 5x 1.92 TB SSD

Compute node specifications (when applicable)

Model Industry-standard 2U server

CPU 2x Intel Xeon E5-2697 v3 (14 cores each)

Memory 384 GB

Disk None

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XenDesktop Hosted Desktop VM configuration Table 2. XenDesktop Hosted Desktop VM specifications

Attribute Specification

Operating system Windows 10 LTSB 64-bit

Virtual hardware VM virtual hardware version 13

VMware tools 10.1.7

Number of vCPUs 2

Memory—including MCS RAM cache 2304 MB

MCS RAM cache size 512 MB

Virtual disk—VMDK 40 GB

NTFS cluster alignment 8 KB

SCSI controller VMware Paravirtual

Virtual floppy drive Removed

Virtual CD/DVD drive Removed

NIC vendor and model

Number of ports/NIC x speed

VMXNET3

1x 10 Gigabit Ethernet

OS page file 1.5 GB starting and max.

XenDesktop Hosted Shared Desktop VM configuration Table 3. XenDesktop Hosted Shared Desktop VM specification

Attribute Specification

Operating system Windows Server 2016

Virtual hardware VM virtual hardware version 13

VMware tools 10.1.7

Number of vCPUs 4

Memory—including MCS RAM cache 32,768 MB

MCS RAM cache size—per VM 4096 MB

Virtual disk—VMDK 100 GB

NTFS cluster alignment 8 KB

SCSI controller VMware Paravirtual

Virtual floppy drive Removed

Virtual CD/DVD drive Removed

NIC vendor and model

Number of ports/NIC x speed

VMXNET3

1x 10 Gigabit Ethernet

OS page file 28 GB starting and max.

Datastore configuration For this test configuration, 4 x 2 TB NFS datastores were created and presented to the HPE SimpliVity 380 and compute nodes. XenDesktop clones the master image to each to spread the load across four datastores, which helps ensure balance of I/O load across hosts.

Performance testing procedures In each case, balance of VMs across hosts in the vSphere cluster, as well as balance of storage across HPE SimpliVity 380 nodes was ensured before starting a Login VSI run. During each run, VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™ was set to Partially Automated mode to ensure VMs would not vMotion to another host within the vSphere cluster.

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Login VSI All performance testing documented utilized the Login VSI benchmarking tool. Login VSI is the industry-standard load testing solution for centralized virtualized desktop environments. When used for benchmarking, the software measures the total response time of several specific user operations being performed within a desktop workload in a scripted loop. The baseline is the measurement of the response time of specific operations performed in the desktop workload, which is measured in milliseconds (ms).

There are two values in particular that are important to note: VSIbase and VSImax.

• VSIbase: A score reflecting the response time of specific operations performed in the desktop workload when there is little or no stress on the system. A low baseline indicates a better user experience, resulting in applications responding faster in the environment.

• VSImax: The maximum number of desktop sessions attainable on the host before experiencing degradation in host and desktop performance.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise used the latest stable release, Login VSI 4.1.12, to perform the tests. A total of 60 Login VSI launchers were used to generate connections to desktop machines. Each launcher can handle up to 25 sessions, but in some instances, up to 27 sessions were started from a subset of launchers. Performance of the launcher VMs was monitored, and there was no negative impact seen.

For these tests, HPE used the Login VSI Knowledge Worker workload for hosted desktop testing and the Office Worker workload for hosted shared desktop testing. These workloads simulate the following applications, found in almost every environment:

• Microsoft® Word 2010

• Microsoft Excel 2010

• Microsoft PowerPoint 2010

• Microsoft Outlook 2010

• Internet Explorer

• Mind Map

• Adobe® Flash Player

• Adobe Reader XI

• Doro PDF Printer

• Photo Viewer

Test results The following are the results of tests described:

Table 4. Test result summary

Test case VSIbase VSImax average VSImax reached?

750 Knowledge Workers—Hosted 754 ms 1001 ms No

1300 Knowledge Workers—Hosted 786 ms 982 ms No

800 Office Workers—Hosted shared 705 ms 1323 ms No

1600 Office Workers—Hosted shared 688 ms 1506 ms No

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Hosted desktops—750 Knowledge Worker users—without compute nodes VSIbase for the environment was 754 ms, and VSImax was not reached in any run. VSImax average was 1001 ms, and VSImax threshold was 1754 ms. Latency was consistently low, showing how the HPE SimpliVity infrastructure could easily handle the 750 Knowledge Worker users.

Figure 3. Hosted desktops—without compute nodes

Hosted desktops—1300 Knowledge Worker users—with compute nodes VSIbase for the environment was 786 ms, and VSImax was not reached in any run. VSImax average was 982 ms, and VSImax threshold was 1754 ms. Latency was consistently low, showing how the HPE SimpliVity infrastructure could easily handle the 1300 Knowledge Worker users in a hosted desktop configuration with Windows 10. Most importantly, this was done only four nodes providing storage and leveraging previous generation hardware for compute nodes.

Figure 4. Hosted desktops—with compute nodes

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Hosted shared desktops—800 Office Worker users—without compute nodes VSIbase for the environment was 705 ms, and VSImax was not reached in any run. VSImax average was 1323 ms, and VSImax threshold was 1705 ms. Latency was consistently low, showing how the HPE SimpliVity infrastructure could easily handle the 800 Office Worker users in a hosted shared configuration with Windows Server 2016.

Figure 5. Hosted shared desktops—without compute nodes

Hosted shared desktops—1600 Office Worker users—with compute nodes VSIbase for the environment was 688 ms, and VSImax was not reached in any run. VSImax average was 1506 ms, and VSImax threshold was 1688 ms. Latency was consistently low, showing how the HPE SimpliVity infrastructure could easily handle the 1600 Office Worker users in a hosted shared desktop configuration with Windows Server 2016. Most importantly, this was done only four nodes providing storage and leveraging previous generation hardware for compute nodes.

Figure 6. Hosted shared desktops—with compute nodes

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Analysis of test results from Login VSI This performance white paper is a good demonstration of leveraging past investments for a better ROI, while scaling up without the additional cost of unnecessary disk. At first, I was a bit lost at what those compute nodes were. After a conversation with Jason Shiplett, the principal architect for HPE SimpliVity client virtualization solutions, I quickly realized that those were legacy hardware from a previous generation (Intel® Haswell), being used to simply augment the compute (CPU, Memory, Networking) layer of the solution to support a greater number of VDI and SBC desktops at a lower cost. Pretty cool, huh!? Well, therein lies the beauty of hyperconverged systems—they scale, and the HPE SimpliVity 380 demonstrates additional flexibility I had not seen demonstrated to date.

So this white paper gets right to it with the testing, with the goal of demonstrating how a clustered hyperconverged system can scale using alternative building blocks. In this case, it can be expected that the 4x HPE SimpliVity 380 nodes with Intel Xeon 2600 v4-based processors will be workhorses as demonstrated through the 750 VDI sessions and 800 SBC sessions. It can be expected that adding 4x compute nodes with Intel Xeon 2600 v3-based processors will not run as efficiently as the HPE SimpliVity 380 nodes, but should contribute to the compute pool significantly.

A couple other points of interest:

1. There could be a couple of reasons why we see the greater number of virtual users on the SBC solution. The first is because the Office Worker workload is less intense than the Knowledge Worker workload used in the VDI test. The second is because typically SBC is more efficient than VDI due to the shared OS through the session hosts.

2. HPE SimpliVity uses Windows 10 LTSB. I haven’t seen anybody use this and was curious about their choice. Jason mentioned that because it is not cursed with the file type association (FTA) issues related to the Microsoft Edge browser and PDF files being opened by the Login VSI virtual user. If you are optimizing the Windows 10 image, then I would expect to see a similar performance profile between LTSB and CBB. This may be something to confirm.

The results of this testing looked great. Very few stuck sessions, very good (less than 800 ms) VSI Baseline averages which are representative of the best performance you can get out of them system when it is only running a handful of sessions. In all cases, VSImax was not hit which means there was plenty of compute and storage resources available to host the number of users as advertised. We see a ton of headroom when just the 4x HPE SimpliVity 380s are tested, but stick to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s guidance as their demonstrated maximum in this case, your production users will love you for it. When the compute nodes are added and the number of virtual users are nearly doubled we would expect the system resources to get tapped out pretty quickly as those nodes are previous generation processors, and that is what we see as the VSImax Averaged Index Value is closer to the VSImax threshold, but still not causing VSImax. It’s all good.

One additional takeaway is that there must be a healthy storage architecture in the HPE SimpliVity 380 as the number of virtual users was nearly doubled, but given that the compute nodes did not add any additional storage capacity or performance, it all had to come from the HPE SimpliVity 380 nodes.

Solution Validated by Login VSI.

Technical white paper

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© Copyright 2017 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Adobe is a trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Microsoft, Windows, and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Citrix and XenDesktop are registered trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one more of its subsidiaries and may be registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. VMware, VMware vSphere, VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler, VMware ESXi, and VMware Horizon View are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other third-party trademark(s) is/are property of their respective owner(s).

a00017191ENW, June 2017

Summary Utilizing HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure dramatically simplifies IT systems management. The HPE SimpliVity solution delivers industry-leading data efficiency, global unified management, and built-in data protection. For client virtualization environments, HPE SimpliVity provides an unmatched user experience without compromising desktop density or resiliency.

About Login VSI Login VSI provides performance insights for virtualized desktop and server environments. Enterprise IT departments use Login VSI products in all phases of their virtual desktop deployment—from planning to deployment to change management—for more predictable performance, higher availability, and a more consistent end-user experience. The world’s leading virtualization vendors use the flagship product, Login VSI, to benchmark performance. With minimal configuration, Login VSI products works in VMware® Horizon View™, Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services), and any other Windows-based virtual desktop solution. For more information, download a trial at loginvsi.com.

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