With ThinIO being launched soon, I thought I would share my results testing ThinIO with Machine Creation Services on XenServer. In this blog post I will go over my ThinIO testing methodology and results.
I was very fortunate to be able to perform early testing of ThinScale ThinIO. Overall results on XenServer with Machine Creation Services were very good. ThinIO was very easy to install, configure, and drastically decreased the load on XenServer storage repositories.
**Testing Details
**
The test environment and workloads were as follows:
- Hypervisor: XenServer 6.2 with Local Storage Repository
- Image Deployment: Machine Creation Services
- Testing Method: Login VSI 4.1 Medium Workload
- Operating System: Windows 8.1 x64
- vCPU: 2
- System RAM: 4GB
- ThinIO Cache: 512MB
- Technology: Citrix XenDesktop 7.5
- Test Runtime: 45 minutes
- Statistic Sample Period: 5 seconds
**Testing Results
**
While testing ThinIO with XenDesktop virtual machines deployed using Machine Creation Services, write IO on the storage was greatly reduced. As you can see from the charts below, write IO savings was 87% and total IOPS savings was 84%.
Now IO’s are an important factor but another factor are data requests to the storage, also known as throughput. As you can see from the carts below, write savings were 89% and total requests savings were 80%.
As you can see ThinIO can help with reducing impact on your storage infrastructure when deploying virtual desktops with Machine Creation Services. With 350MB to 512MB of RAM you can make users happy by reducing user experience issues caused by storage performance pain without breaking the bank.
**Additional Testing
**
Next round of testing will be done on XenServer Creedence with XenApp/XenDesktop 7.6 with ThinIO, Intellicache, and the new In-memory read caching feature. Each feature will be tested separately and results compared along with combination of all three working together.
If you have found this article interesting or if you have any insights, please feel free to contact me via email.