BC3209 and DV2484

I had on my schedule for today two sessions, BC3209 and DV2484. BC3209 was titled “Creating the Fastest Possible Backups Using VMware Consolidated Backup - A Design Blueprint”; DV2484 was titled “Server and Storage Sizing for VMware View”. You might be wondering why I haven’t published summaries of either of these two sessions.

I skipped out on BC3209 to attend the vCloud event with Paul Maritz, which—unfortunately—turned out to be a complete non-event. So, that’s why you don’t see any coverage of that session.

As for DV2484, I did attend the first 30 minutes of that session, but didn’t find anything particularly useful in the session. At least, nothing that I hadn’t already seen or experienced before. The portion of the session that I attended simply discussed how to gather information about the physical desktop. They did provide some examples of information they’d gathered:

• Average of 130MHz of CPU utilization
• Average of 5 IOPS of disk transfers
• Average of about 75MB of RAM used by a VM with Windows XP/Office installed (after TPS kicked in and reclaimed some RAM)

I found the IOPS figure rather interesting; I’d had some conversations earlier in the week during the PTAB meetings with another participant around VMware’s reference architecture for VMware View. In those reference architectures, VMware had only specified 7 IOPS for each desktop, and that PTAB participant felt that number was far too low and, in fact, had been bitten by trying to use that reference architecture in real-world implementations. This makes me question the 5 IOPS figure that was presented in DV2484. The real question is, if 5 IOPS isn’t realistic, what is realistic? I’d love to hear some feedback from readers on that question.