Summary

The new Dell PowerEdge R760 with 4th Generation Intel^® Xeon^® Processors, offers customers the increased scalability and performance necessary to improve operation of their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). The testing highlighted in this document was conducted (in November and December 2022 by Dell Engineers) to provide customers with insights on the capabilities of these new systems and to quantify the value that they can provide in a VDI environment. To accomplish this, performance was measured on a previous generation Dell PowerEdge R750 system and then compared to the results measured on the new Dell PowerEdge R760.  

• The R750 server configuration reflects the guidance Dell Technologies provides customers, based on our rigorous test and profiling efforts for Dell Validated Designs. 
• The R760 configuration tested was chosen to match the cost profile as closely as possible while also taking advantage of the increases in core count and memory performance delivered by this new generation of processors. 

In this example, the R750 server used 28 core CPUs while the R760 used 32 core CPUs. The correlation between cores and memory drove the R760 configuration to use 2TB of RAM, as compared to the 1TB of RAM used in the R750.   

VDI test tool used 

Login VSI by Login Consultants is the de-facto industry standard tool for testing VDI environments and server-based computing (RDSH environments). It installs a standard collection of desktop application software (such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat Reader) on each VDI desktop. It then uses launcher systems to connect a specified number of users to available desktops within the environment. When the user is connected, the workload is started by a logon script which starts the test script after the user environment is configured by the login script. Each launcher system can launch connections to several ‘target’ machines (that is, VDI desktops). 

VDI Test Methodology 

To ensure the optimal combination of end-user experience (EUE) and cost-per-user, performance analysis and characterization (PAAC) on Dell VDI solutions is carried out using a carefully designed holistic methodology that monitors both hardware resource utilization parameters and EUE during load-testing.  

Login VSI 

For Login VSI, the launchers and Login VSI environment are configured and managed by a centralized management console. Additionally, the following login and boot paradigm is used:  

• Users were logged in within a login timeframe of one hour.
• All desktops are pre-booted before logins can begin. 
• We used a one-minute data collection interval. 

Test configuration

The following table lists the hardware and software components of the infrastructure used for performance analysis and characterization testing. 

Profiles and workloads

For this test we used the following workload and profiles.

PowerEdge R750 vs. PowerEdge R760 comparison results 

The following table summarizes the test results.

Conclusion

As shown in the results above, the R760 delivered over 20% more VDI users (220 vs.183) while performing at the same average CPU utilization level. While the core frequency of the R760 was lower, the increased core count allowed the system to expand the number of users while delivering a consistent performance level for the individual VDI sessions.