The VDI Solutions team modified the vSphere Connection settings from their defaults to the ones shown in the following figure. The team performed this modification to decrease the amount of time taken to provision and re-create the Citrix MCS linked clones between tests.
The impact of this was the high amount of IOPS, network bandwidth, and latency seen in the system during the re-create phase of the tests. The validation used a two-port 25 GbE NIC design, where storage traffic was configured to use one port and workload and management traffic used the other.
Either configuring the network in an alternative manner or adding additional NICs for storage network traffic could likely reduce latency.
- 1536 GB of memory installed on each node is more than sufficient for the number of desktops tested.
- The feature of MCS linked clones where the virtual machines are deleted and re-created after the users log out leads to the highest workload on each host, higher than at any point during the test period itself. The CPU reaches the same maximum levels at it did during testing, and memory, network, and datastore metrics all surpassed the levels seen during the test period.
- The team used the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Thinwire+ remote display protocol with default settings during testing.
- The data collection interval was one minute for any non vSAN datastore metrics. All vSAN metrics data collection intervals were five minutes.