This webinar will cover the current state of MCS and PVS. We'll look at how MCS and PVS work differently on hypervisors like ESXi and Hyper-V. We will look at new target platforms such as Windows Server 2012 R2 to see if PVS or MCS behave differently.
And lastly we will dive into the new VHDX-based PVS wC option and why you should be using it for all your workloads.
The webinar will be presented by Nick Rintalan
http://blogs.citrix.com/2014/04/18/turbo-charging-your-iops-with-the-new-pvs-cache-in-ram-with-disk-overflow-feature-part-one/
E: Drive Test: This IOMETER test used an 8 GB file configured to write directly on write-cache disk (E:) bypassing PVS. This test would allow us to know the true underlying IOPS provided by the SAN.
New PVS RAM Cache with disk Overflow: We configured the new RAM cache to use up to 10 GB RAM and ran the IOMETER test with an 8 GB file so that all I/O would remain in the RAM.
New PVS RAM Cache with disk Overflow: We configured the new RAM cache to use up to 10 GB RAM and ran the IOMETER test with a 15 GB file so that at least 5 GB of I/O would overflow to disk.
Old PVS Cache in Device RAM: We used the old PVS Cache in RAM feature and configured it for 10 GB RAM. We ran the IOMETER test with an 8 GB file so that the RAM cache would not run out, which would make the VM crash!
PVS Cache on Device Hard Disk: We configured PVS to cache on device hard disk and ran IOMETER test with 8 GB file.
With the exception of the size of the IOMETER test file as detailed above, all of the IOMETER tests were run with the following parameters:
4 workers configured
Depth Queue set to 16 for each worker
4 KB block size
80% Writes / 20% Reads
90% Random IO / 10% Sequential IO
30 minute test duration
Windows 7 – PVS 7.1 RAM Cache with 256 MB on Hyper-V 2012 R2
This test was configured just like the MCS baseline test and run on the same hardware.
Single Hyper-V host with hyper-threaded Quad Core CPU and 32 GB RAM
A single dedicated 7200 RPM SATA 3 disk with 64 MB cache was used for hosting the write cache disk for the Windows 7 VMs
Windows 7 x64 VMs: 2 vCPU with 2.5 GB RAM
PVS 7.1 Standard Image with RAM Cache set at 256 MB (PVS on separate host)
Windows Event Logs were redirected directly to the write cache disk so that they persist and their I/O would not be cached in RAM
The profile was fully optimized with UPM and Folder Redirection (profile share on separate host)
http://blogs.citrix.com/2014/07/07/turbo-charging-your-iops-with-the-new-pvs-cache-in-ram-with-disk-overflow-feature-part-two/