Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > AMD > White Papers > Upgrade to Dell EMC PowerEdge R6515 servers and gain better OLTP and VDI performance > How we approached testing
Taking these considerations into account, we ran a mixed workload in the PT data center that reflects needs your organization may have in today’s business environment. To demonstrate the performance you might expect from moving your current workloads to a newer Dell EMC PowerEdge R6515 solution versus a legacy solution, we ran a mixed VDI and OLTP workload on two server clusters:
For our legacy environment, we chose software versions based on the age of the servers with the latest updates available for each release. Table 1 presents more configuration details for each cluster.
Table 1: An overview of the hardware and software we used for the two clusters we tested. The older software versions and drives reflect what an organization may use in a legacy environment.
On both clusters, we ran the VDI and OLTP workloads simultaneously to reflect an organization using a single cluster of four servers to meet multiple needs, such as supporting remote workers and ecommerce transactions. For VDI, we used VMware View® Planner with Horizon running the Standard Profile workload to simulate an environment of 100 virtual users logging in and completing various workday tasks. We measured the latency—or time spent waiting—that users could experience while using virtual desktops to work. We used the DVD Store 3 (DS3) benchmark to test OLTP performance, which measures the number of orders per minute (OPM) a solution can process. To represent server usage that would leave processing headroom in the event of a server failure, we tuned the benchmark to keep the average CPU utilization in the 70 to 80 percent range while the workloads ran. We worked to balance the resource needs of both workloads to produce successful VDI runs and balanced performance across our OLTP database VMs while maintaining our target CPU utilization range.
When we tested with the mixed workload on the newer Dell EMC PowerEdge R6515 servers, we achieved the same number of VDI users with lower latency and a higher number of orders per minute than the legacy PowerEdge R630 servers. After running the initial mixed-workload test, we used new features in the newer-generation environment to run an additional test on the PowerEdge R6515 cluster. Read the "Explore modern solutions with Tanzu" section for more information.