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The PowerVault Manager UI is used to configure storage options and monitor storage performance during testing.
The PowerVault ME5024 appliance that is used in this testing is configured as shown here:
Horizon does not require any special configuration to work with PowerVault. The ME5024 storage is presented as block storage volumes discoverable through vCenter. When a Horizon desktop pool is created, the volumes (datastores) are selectable as usable disk space.
For performance reasons, a minimum of 16 volumes is recommended for a VDI environment. This configuration ensures good queue balancing and reduces I/O bottlenecks. For this test, Horizon is configured to use 16 datastores for VM creation for all Horizon desktop pools. The 16 datastores are configured on the ME5024 appliance. The datastores are mapped to a vCenter cluster consisting of six ESXi VDI workload hosts. These workload hosts (PowerEdge R6525 servers) are configured to use 25 GbE iSCSI with MPIO.
On the ME5024 appliance, eight of the volumes (datastores) are configured to use controller A. The other eight volumes (datastores) are configured to use controller B. This configuration spreads the virtual desktops evenly across all datastores and across both ME5024 controllers. This configuration helps ensure optimal performance, consistency, and load balancing.
Note: With most applications and workloads, storage traffic is typically 70% reads. There are applications that generate all reads or all writes, but the average is a 70/30 read/write ratio. VDI is typically 70-80% writes during steady state. Configure the storage appliance with adequate disk performance to accommodate the higher write ratio.
Component | Specification |
Make | Dell PowerVault |
Model | ME5024 |
Firmware | I200C001 |
Disks | 24 x 960 GB SSD SAS drives |
Volumes mapped to ESXi workload hosts | 16 x 500 GB volumes, with eight assigned to each controller |
Front-end ports |
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