VMware Horizon Community
mjtvillanova
Contributor
Contributor

VMware View - SSD Required for Base Image?

Hi -

I'm working on building a demo of a VMware View 5 Environment. I keep reading about using  an SSD based SAN or SSD local storage on the ESXi hosts for the base image. If I am using View 5 for at maximum 75 users on Windows 7 with a back end dedicated SAN aggregate of 12 disks at 15K will be sufficient? Do you have another suggestion?

Thanks!

Tags (4)
Reply
0 Kudos
4 Replies
KWKirchner
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

What kind of pool are you going to use?  If you use a dedicated pool then you probably will only notice a delay when each desktop VM is initially built.  If you are using a floating pool and discarding the VM's as they are disconnected, then you might see a lot of I/O contention as they are re-built every time they are requested.  There would also be a hit during recompose, but that should not be very often.

Reply
0 Kudos
mjtvillanova
Contributor
Contributor

I was thinking about using a dedicated pool. That is how i've been testing. The floating pool was taking a long time even when I'm testing with one VDI machine.

Reply
0 Kudos
amandasmith
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I think that in your case you need to consider 32 and 64 bit versions to be two distinct OSs. I believe you will have to create a new parent VM, snapshot it and point your pool to that.

Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else
Reply
0 Kudos
ebernard
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Your backend storage should be enough to handle 75 users, following this average calculations :

75 users x 12 IOPS (average in steady state) = 900 IOPS

and 12 disks x 150 IOPS (@15k) is = 1 800 IOPS

With the booting (or logon) process, which is around 40 IOPS of, let's say, 20% of users, so 15 users, you have in the peak : 40x15 = 600 IOPS

If you have dedicated SSD drives for the golden image (also known as replicas), it will easily support this logon process for more users and other process (refresh, etc...)

Does it answer to your question ?

Emmanuel BERNARD
Lead Solution Engineer | VMware Cloud | EMEA

Please mark "Helpful" or "Correct Answer" if applies. Appreciate it.
Reply
0 Kudos