Power Off VM's when not in use?

[AGratefulDad]

Morning all,

Just wondering if it makes sense to power off the VDI VM's when not in use.

A lot of of our field personnel only touch the machines maybe once a week and about half of our VDI's are field personnel.

What are some of the pro's and con's to this type of setup.

Thanks in advance!

Twitter: thevirtualguy

[mittim12]

Well I think the most obvious pro is that you do not have unused VM's taking up valuable resources. I think a con could be storage utilization if you have a large amount of users login at the same time.

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[lnairn]

Hi,

yes, it's a best practice to standby the virtual machines when they are not in use, you can configure it editing the pool, and setting this in the remote destop power policy.

[eeg3]

You're going to have far less wasted resources by powering them down when not in use. Also, we've found that the desktops perform a little better if they get a fresh reboot every once in awhile.

On the downside, it will take a little bit longer for the user to login to the virtual desktop if it is suspended or powered off.

[jdaconsulting]

Powering off the VM on log off was our original intended approach. However, the reality when we tested with View 3.x and 4.0 was that the first client login attempt would fail with the 'no desktop resources available' as the VM did not power up and communicate with View in time. Not good from a service provider standpoint as it would result in a flood of help desk calls. As a result, we had to forgo that approach. We have not yet tested to see if View 4.5 addresses this in some fashion, perhaps via a longer timeout window.

[mittim12]

Under the advanced options in the pool configuration you can set a minimum number of VM's that remain powered on at all times. This way you can always have a certain number of VM's online and ready to service request. As someone logs in and takes the VM another VM will start to power up.

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[jdaconsulting]

Is that a 4.5 setting? I don't remember that in 3.x or 4.x. Good suggestion however, given the typical 9-5 use of our pools it would seem that, at least in our case, keeping enough VM's powered on to meet the initial logon demand within that narrow morning window without returning any resource unavailable errors might very well defeat the purpose of powering them off in the first place. It is worth taking a look at though.

[jdaconsulting]

To answer my own question - yes, it is a 4.5 setting and in 4.5 a powered off spare VM will indeed be powered on in time without a resources unavailable error. Definitely worth taking a closer look at.

[WillUsher]

We tried that with View 4.0 and while it worked (no timeout error), the latency between user authentication and desktop login was too long for our users (I think it was 2-3 min).

Each of our users got their own dedicated VM, so we couldn't just have 1-2 standby VM's running like a non-persistant pool would allow.

[Robertkadish]

there is none as long as you have unlimitied IOPS - IE Disk there are many ways to provide enough IOPS.

Here are a few to look at

Local SSD drives

Fusion IO

My company Atlantis Computing

[jftuga]

I have written a vSphere Power CLI script for VM power management. Since it works on the folder level, you want to make sure that you don't have 2 or more folders with the same name. It has 3 options: start a VM, power off the guest, or do a hard power off. The script may need a username & password to an account that has "Virtual Machine User" privileges. If you run it from the Task Scheduler as this user, then you shouldn't need this hardcoded in the script itself. You need to also install the vSphere Power CLI.

See the attached zip file.

-John