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 Dell Labs by Intel Engineers in December 2022 to provide customers with insights on the capabilities of these new systems and to quantify the value that the systems can provide in a VDI environment. Performance was measured on a previous-generation Dell PowerEdge R750 system and then compared to the results measured on the new Dell PowerEdge R760. Each cluster was configured with four identically configured systems. In this test, the R750 server used the 40-core Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 CPU, while the R760 used the 44-core Intel Xeon Platinum 8458P CPU. There is a correlation between cores and memory, which drove the R760 configuration to use 2 TB of RAM compared to the 1.5 TB of RAM used in the R750.  

Login VSI VDI test tool 

Login VSI by Login Consultants is the industry-standard tool for testing VDI environments and server-based computing (RDSH environments). It installs a standard collection of desktop application software (for example, 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. Once a user is connected, a login script configures the user environment and starts the test script and workload.  Each launcher system can launch connections to several ”target” machines (VDI desktops). 

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 was used:  

• Users were logged in within a login timeframe of 1 hour.
• All desktops were booted before logins were commenced. 
• Data collection interval used was 1 minute. 
  
  

Test configuration

The following table describes the hardware and software components of the infrastructure used for performance analysis and characterization test:

Table 1.  Hardware and software components

For the purposes of this test, the following workload and profiles were used:

Table 2.  Workload and profiles

Dell PowerEdge R750 and Dell PowerEdge R760 comparison results 

The following table summarizes the test results:

Table 3.  Test results

Conclusion

In our testing, the R760 delivered over 16.6 percent more VDI users (358 compared with 307) while performing at the same average CPU utilization level.