The components used for the study comprised: Cisco® Unified Computing System (UCS) B200M4 blade servers, Cisco Nexus 9000 series switches, and NetApp® AFF8080EX-A storage system, VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0 Update 1, Citrix Provisioning Services 7.7, and Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.7 software. The video also helps visually illustrate the functional nature of the Login VSI 4.1 Knowledge Worker workload. I also generated a video sequence that demonstrates side-by-side performance for the single session test, which helps to correlate the qualitative differences from the synthetic workload perspective with the quantitative performance differences of the VDA system. The single session testing confirmed that overall CPU usage was higher for much of the Microsoft Office 2016 workload – other VDA metrics was analyzed as well. (Note that the systems under test had no GPU installed, so DirectX-enabled applications had to rely on the CPU for graphics rasterization.) After running tests to gauge host scalability and Login VSI results, I ran single session tests to collect additional performance data. Microsoft Office 2016 proved to be more CPU-intensive than Microsoft Office 2010, resulting in a notable 9% decrease in user density. The user density results I saw for the various scenarios were certainly quantifiable. I configured the tests to use non-persistent desktops with Citrix Provisioning Services running Windows 10 and turned off Defender. To eliminate as many variables in the environment as I could to make the comparison of Office 2010 and Office 2016 workloads as “vanilla” as possible. I decided to combine testing objectives for determining the performance characterization of the Cisco UCS B200 M4 blade server running Windows 10 VDI workloads along with a Microsoft Office version comparison. To find out, I set up a series of performance tests using Citrix XenDesktop 7.7.

Since Microsoft Office 2016 was released, I wondered how this new application stack might impact EUC user densities in comparison to densities under a Microsoft Office 2010 workload. For example, I recently released a large scale FlexPod Datacenter solution comprising of 5,000 seats of Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop on UCS B200 M4 blade servers and NetApp All-Flash storage.

As a part of the Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions team, I spend a good portion of my time conducting performance tests to size EUC software configurations in conjunction with Cisco UCS hardware and products from our partners.

Xendesktop 7.7 server vdi