Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > Intel > White Papers > The science behind the report: PowerEdge R650xs servers with 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors > Introduction
For the VDI test environment, we set up three Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 servers, installed VMware ESXi 7.0.2 on them, and created a VMware vSAN® cluster to host the View Planner harness VMs, VMware vCenter®, AD, and Horizon® 8 Connection Server. All three servers were connected to an S4048-ON switch via 10GbE dual-port uplinks using LACP load balancing for performance. Next, we set up the two servers under test: A Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 server equipped with two Intel Xeon Gold 6230 processors and 768 GB of memory; and a Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs server equipped with Intel Xeon Gold 6330 processors and 1 TB of memory. The 3-node all-flash NVMe VMWare vSAN cluster was set up to support vSAN HCI Mesh over multiple 10GbE uplinks and provided the storage for both servers under test.
To determine the maximum number of VMs that each VDI environment could support, we used VMware View Planner 4.6 to generate workload simulations using common desktop productivity applications. During the benchmark testing, we used an Extech power monitoring unit to collect power data from each server under load. We ran the benchmark three times and collected data each time. We took the median benchmark scores and power utilization data to generate our results.