Mellanox Delivers 50% More Virtual Desktops in VDI Running Windows Server 2012 Over Hyper-V

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that its 10GbE with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) interconnect solutions achieved a record of application performance and efficiency for VDIs.

Mellanox internal benchmark results from the combined VDI solution of Mellanox 10GbE, LSI Corporation‘s Nytro MegaRAID Application Acceleration Card, and Windows Server 2012 over Hyper-V, delivered 105 virtual desktops with less than 5s response time compared to 70 virtual desktops when running over TCP/IP and reduced the application latency by 30%.

The benchmark performance demonstrates how the joint solution helps to overcome bottlenecks that limit the number of Virtual Desktops running on a physical server that is simultaneously accessing storage.

The new performance results were enabled by Microsoft SMB Direct protocol implemented in Windows Server 2012 running under Hyper-V and connected to File Storage with an LSI Nytro MegaRAID Application Acceleration card, all connected by Mellanox’s end-to-end 10GbE with RoCE interconnect solution.

"Storage can represent 40 to 60% of the cost of a VDI installation," said Tony Afshary, director of marketing, accelerated solutions division, LSI. "The PCIe flash LSI Nytro MegaRAID card with Mellanox’s 10GbE RDMA adapter allows more VDI desktops to be supported by combining low-latency server-side flash technology with intelligent flash caching. Since only a fraction of VDI data needs flash acceleration, the balance of the data is maintained on more economical, capacity optimized HDDs. The joint solution is designed to enable more virtual desktops per physical server while providing significant cost benefits over traditional FC-attached storage subsystems."

SMB Direct takes advantage of Mellanox’s RDMA interconnect technology to provide greater performance and reduced CPU overhead in VDI-based enterprise data center applications. RDMA-based technologies include the company’s 10/40/56GbE and FDR 56Gb/s IB interconnect products.

"VDI has proven to be a very effective technology to increase data center efficiency. Mellanox’s interconnect solution plays a key role in solving the I/O bottlenecks that occur when accessing remote storage in a highly virtualized data center," said Kevin Deierling, VP marketing at Mellanox. "Using SMB Direct over Mellanox’s RDMA-enabled interconnects with LSI’s Nytro MegaRAID delivers higher application performance and simplifies the VDI deployment and maintenance, resulting in higher efficiency and better return-on-investment."