Hyper-V Dynamic Memory test for VDI density

Hi, I’m Michael Kleef, senior technical product manager within the Windows Server and Cloud division.

As Brad Anderson and I discussed at the TechEd Europe keynote today, Dynamic Memory, a new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, can increase Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) densities by 40% compared to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 and also well above a leading industry solution. It’s also not just a benefit to VDI. Our Technology Adoption Program (TAP) customer data also highlights that other server workloads benefit from Dynamic Memory with gains of between 25% and 50% depending on the specific workload and usage pattern.

Scope

From previous capacity planning data we already knew that Disk IO is the first bottleneck to be hit in VDI performance, followed by memory as a ceiling to density (not necessarily performance), and finally processor, last of all.

Our primary goal was simply to understand how Dynamic Memory influences the memory ceiling to density, and realistically, by how much. Secondary goals were to understand how XenDesktop 4 functioned with Hyper-V R2 SP1 and its different approach to storage using Citrix Provisioning Services.

--> The rest is on the blog :

http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2010/11/08/hyper-v-dynamic-memory-test-for-vdi-density.aspx

This data point came from a series of tests, on different hardware vendor platforms, that we have run at scale in our test labs in Redmond. To provide some additional technical details, I want to take a moment to explain what we focused on in testing and provide a high level summary of the test methodology we used, and the results we found. In the near future, we expect to release a whitepaper that goes into more detail of the tests including specific opportunities to increase performance and response.