Home > Storage > PowerStore > Virtualization and Cloud > VMware Horizon 8 with Dell EMC PowerEdge R6525 Servers and Dell EMC PowerStore 9000 > Pool creation
When administrators plan for a successful VDI deployment using instant clones, a great user experience during the login phase and steady state are paramount considerations. However, the resource demands for VM pool creation and VM refresh at log off can also be significant. Resource demands must be understood and factored in when sizing the environment.
Horizon instant clone VM pool creation from a new gold image causes brief but heavy demand on storage I/O, bandwidth, and CPU activity. For this reason, avoid creating pools while other phases of a VDI workload are active (login phase, steady state, or log off and VM refresh).
For this test, a new Horizon pool of 1,000 desktop VMs is created. PowerStore shows a brief but significant spike in IOPS, latency, bandwidth, and CPU demand during the first 10 minutes. Following this activity is a sustained but less intense period of demand as Horizon provisions the new desktop VMs. In this testing, creating a pool of 1,000 desktop VMs takes about one hour.
The behavior of storage resource demand is different when an additional 1,000 user Horizon pool is created from the same gold image. The initial brief spike is not experienced, however, there is still a sustained period of storage demand while the desktop VMs are provisioned. In this test, creating a pool of an additional 1,000 desktop VMs completes in under one hour.
Initial and subsequent pool creation causes minimal impact to CPU usage on the PowerEdge 6525 servers. Host server memory utilization slowly increases as desktop VMs are provisioned.