Does OS "tuning" help VDI performance? (Part 1)

This defrag on Windows 7 must absolutely be disabled, since it will kill the VM, and not generate benefits.

I believe this 9% benefit would scale when dozens of VMs are running on the same host, and even give you some more VMs per host (just a guess). Those little CPU cycles saved by disabling many services, might also be significant when you multiply this by many VMs.

Another point to mention: Disabling animations and visual effects will improve network usage and display protocol response times, so, it is definitely worth doing.

Anyone from a Terminal Services background should be feeling a sense of 'Deja Vu' while reading this.

Any 'shared platform', whether it is a Terminal Server or a Hypervisor will benefit from optimisation of the workloads they are expected to handle. This does not just derive benefits of increased performance but also better reliability, scalability and security. In addition, any application delivered using a remoting protocol will obviously benefit from optimisation of any factor which increases the amount of data transferred across the wire.

The most successful Terminal Server projects I have been involved in are those which understood the necessity to optimise everything and ensured ample time in each project to ensure that this happened., this will also be the stick by which successful VDI projects are measured.

Nothing new here, certainly as far us old TS/RDS guys are concerned.

Come on Ron, you just dug out one of your old docs, did a 'find' on TS and substituted VDI.!!

9% difference between two measurements - I have a BIG problem with using this number in any argument:

1) That number surely is within measuring inaccuracy. If you want to get reliable numbers, repeat the measurement multiple times.

2) Users do not notice performance differences smaller than 50%. So even if 9% is correct, that is an absolute number. Relative (perceived) difference will be 0.

Ron,

Fantastic article this is the type of detail people are looking for!  I noticed this is part 1.  Will part two include more optimizations and more analysis?  I would very much like to see the impact on IOPS.

It’s too bad the improvement is only 9% I have to agree with the rest of the posters that 9% will go unnoticed by the user community.  That said in a 10,000 seat deployment it could translate to significant savings.  Our prospects and customers have been telling us they have explored this as well.  They all seem to come to a similar conclusion.  It typically plays out something like this.

Our VDI deployment is small compared to physical desktops and Laptops, and the complexity this introduces into the build process is not worth X% savings.   We applied the tweaks using a combination of manual changes and automated script from other vendors.  We have observed that maintaining the tweaks is a major chore as application and OS updates frequently override or negatively impact the modified base OS.

Of course I have a limited working knowledge of how the tweaks are impacted over a long time period.  And the customers and prospects I’m working with may have unique environments which do not represent the majority.

Interesting test but they are not surprising.  As you know, I've been collecting Win7 optimizations on VirtualFeller.com. Most of the optimizations I've seen so far really wouldn't impact CPU or memory.  I think we should look more closely at the disk subsystem.  As an example, having the OS update the last access time stamp is a write to the disk. Let's get rid of that.  Thus we lower the impact on storage.  These writes really wouldn't place a big impact on CPU and nothing to memory.

Desktop OS optimization is supposed to make the OS more responsive to the user while helping to reduce the stress on the underlying hardware. Most of th stress will be on the disk and not on CPU/Memory.  

Correct, i doubt these will impact concurrency on the hypervisor (unless you talk about the big optimizations like defrag, but that is a no brainer), but it should lessen the load on the storage, which is good. Won't help getting more VMs per server, but might help reduce the storage impact

Dan brings up a question I have.  I think it will be interesting to see what the impact on IOPS is with these tweaks.  

Ron -

Just what memory measurement is that?  I am guessing that after tuning, the OS had lower committed memory and thus was less agressive in paging things out of RAM, possibly leading to the higher memory measurement.  If so, this is a good thing which will show up as an added bennefit in multi-VM tests.

Gahwd, OS tuning have for me been somewhat of an obsession and agony over the years from DOS to Windows 7/2008 R2.  

Say, a lot of us surely remember Rich Dehlinger et.al MetaFrame Tuning Tips from late ‘90s to early ‘00s. See here for example - www.thin-world.com/.../MFTips1.pdf and others.

Tuning ADM templates, batch files and countless tools flew high and low. An example of my own idea of the bare basic “standard” tuning from Windows 2003 TS era is recorded here - jernstrom.org/.../Standard5.zip.

Countless other documents, tools, scripts, adm templates, posts etc. are living in dropbox, discarded USB-pins, dead computers and whatnot. I never disabled any services oddly enough.

It’s not like I’ve not been challenged to those tuning things as I guess no one of us have. My explanation, excuse if you wish, was that these were suggestions and examples that might make some impact and should at least be considered for whatever value they might have. Sometimes some stuff did really matter, other times maybe not so much, still way overdone by any measurement.

The challenge is of course – Is it really worth it? I don’t know, I’m a recovering obsessive tuner :)

As some, I skipped the Vista/2008 stuff (except for GPO Preferences) and jumped back with Windows 7 and 2008 R2.  

As @Helge might recall I went nuts with the 7/08R2 shell, meaning Known Folders and specifically Libraries, aka iShellFolder interface (Wndows 7 SDK shlib.exe build) and the RemoveDuplicateProfileLinks.exe source from The Deployment Guys blog.

As of now I’m still as much ambivalent as ever before, just a bit more pragmatic. Leaving it bee, for surely I’m not the one to administer and maintain? :)

I guess I agree with many that best is to just tune the obvious matters in the OS by requirement and concentrate on the application tuning and standard streamlined Workspace environment.

For all I know VM sprawl, wasted disk and problematic disk IOPS are the real problems as of now, way before CPU and Memory allotments.

The results are interesting to say the least.  Honestly, I would be happy if tuning didn't matter as it would make our jobs easier (but don't tell anyone as this stuff makes us look smart).  

I know of a lot of the tuning tips are carry overs from the Terminal Services/XenApp optimizations and many of those do show improvements, especially when we get to memory management (w2k and w2k3).  We used to also recommend to disable all of the splash screens and animations as the protocols couldn't handle it.  So this begs the bigger question... Has technology improved to a point that makes these optimizations pointless? We know that ICA/HDX can do graphics much better than years ago, same for animations.  We know W2k8/W7 is much better at memory mgmt than W2k3/XP.  

I guess i would need to see more cases to see if it did indeed make a difference. As your test was only 1 VM, I'm hesitant to say "Get lost optimizations".  As it doesn't appear that these settings hurt, I'm erring on the side of caution and plan to continue down the path of an optimized OS.

Im with Feller on that.

Even if the performance doesnt change alot on chart (wich is somehow supicious to me). Making the UI lighter will make the protocol (ICA) life easier and "faster" in the end. Im not against eye candy but cpu cycles and bandwidth arent free.

Im yet to change my mind about optimizations, stop doing and using adm files for XD and XA. I think everyone should do it, because in the worst case scenario (if im completely misleaded) you get to know the products and the OS better.

Good job, Ron.  

CPU utilization management inside each VM might also be a good idea to further improve perceived performance. Although the hypervisor can manage CPU utlization at the VM level, there's nothing to prevent runaway processes from pegging a particular VM.  I'm actually surprised none of the VDI vendors have done this so far, especially since most of them have had a CPU utilization management offering for RDS for quite a while.

I didn't expect any improvements in terms of number of VMs per host. I've already performed a similar exercise by building a minimum-size desktop image using one of several guidelines and deployment kits out there.

I still like what Atlantis Computing does in terms of I/O acceleration. It's a night-and-day difference.

Interesting Guys.

First up, Yes I do work for AppSense

Second up, Yes performance on Windows systems and especially Shared Infrastructure (Citrix/TS/VDI/Virtual Servers etc) has been a large part of my gig for the last 6 1/2 years.

Our Performance Manager product improves scalability, and provides more consistent performance in any VDI environment.

That's not our corporate message, it's a message my customers give me (so I'm happy to use it).

I've given up arguing with Virtual Infrastructure "experts" about why our product won't help, or won't work due to cpu cycle splitting or some other hypervisor hocus pocus.

I just get customers to test it, they say it works, I'm happy :-)

So trimming down what a VDI OS has to do in the background improves performance - seems pretty logical to me.

Just as logical as granualr management of CPU and Memory INSIDE a VDI Guest with mean the guest gives more consistent performance, and uses less resources from the Host.

You learn something new everyday in IT :-)

I think that VDI vendors should include an integrated tool (with the agent or similar) to automatically disable/enable services/features as requested at least for common VM desktop like XP or 7.

This to consolidate optimization and best practice.

I am still testing what optimizing can do for my cuurent hyper-v environment.  (I hate vmware) But from tips to optimize vm os's to the tools vendors have to reduce iops or storage footprint I think it's a better practice over doing nothing.

Maybe a low cost tool to make all the other tips and changes these blogs recommend.  Most people who say they don't think its worth it because they are lazy. If there was a tool I think people would lock on to it.

The accelerators, optimizers and storage tools all seem to make an impact for sure.

@Smcpartin

blogs.technet.com/.../optimising-windows-7-images-for-use-in-vdi.aspx

It's free - doesn't have everything yet but it's a good start.

Dan.

I think the goal of optimizing the guest OS is to improve the user's perception of the virtual environment. Users may not always notice a 9% improvement, but they sure do notice a 9% degradation. The vendors are always looking for ways to optimize the memory and CPU usage on the hypervisor and they will continue to do so. But sometimes, like edgeseeker points out, optimizing inside the guest is still an area where improvements can be made.

I believe the optimizations to implement will be dependent on the applications being virtualized. Consider that some optimizations are specific to a particular application like Internet Explorer's "Force Offscreen Compositing" setting. When that IE setting is not enabled, the users see a lovely blinking effect when some pages load in a remoted environment. Enabling that setting may not change density per server, but not enabling it will result in the user's perceiving the VDI environment to be unusable. I bring this up to point out that such tests may not benefit from generic optimizations or may not change CPU/RAM consumption on the host, but in the real world they could be the difference between a successful POC and a lost opportunity.

As amply discussed above, some optimizations improve other performance metrics such as IOPS and in and of themselves can provide a cost reduction by saving storage costs. I believe that storage response time has the greatest affect on user perception, more so than CPU or even RAM in some cases - probably because despite the move to virtualization many applications and operating systems still make assumptions around the storage being local and fast. Targeting storage related optimizations and software should be at the top of our list for improving user experience. Storage is such an integral part of the user experience those optimizations almost always make sense.  

I guess all said and done, I would still recommend optimizing the OS where it makes sense. You may not get any more users on the box, but you get happier users that adopt the technology and recommend it to their friends and we all benefit.

To emaxt6's point, Citrix actually includes an optimization tool in XenConvert and the Provisioning Services Image builder. Also, as Daniel pointed out above, Jonathan Bennett (of AutoIT fame) has released tool that generates a VBS script to optimize the Windows 7 environment which I find is great for optimizing via Logon scripts.

very good website:

===== http://www.globalmarket.name// =====

The website wholesale for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike, jordan, prada, also including the jeans, shirts, bags, hat and the decorations.

WE ACCEPT CREDIT CARD /WESTERN UNION PAYMENT

YOU MUST NOT MISS IT!!!