Improving Logon Time with PVS Accelerator

The title is correct.  We can improve user logon time by implementing PVS accelerator in XenServer 7.1.

This actually makes perfect sense.

We already showed that PVS Accelerator drastically improves VM boot times because portions of the master vDisk image are cached locally.  Booting a VM equates to roughly 80% reads and 20% writes.  VMs using the same image are reading the same blocks of data. Due to this similarity, we are able to see huge network utilization reductions by using the PVS Accelerator cache. These reductions in the network utilization translates into faster boot times.

But what about logon time?

Logon time isn’t nearly as read IO intensive as boot, but it does yield a 50% read and 50% write ratio.  This would leave me to believe that PVS Accelerator should also improve a user’s logon time (at least for the read portion of the IO).

For the write IO occurring during logon time, we can utilize something within Provisioning Services that has been shown to improve write IO performance: RAM Cache with Disk Overflow.

Let’s look at the results (Note that these results were NOT done on enterprise-grade server hardware):

Our logon times are dropping.

• Optimize Windows 10 = faster logon times
• Implement XenServer PVS Accelerator = even faster logon times
• Enable PVS RAM Cache with Disk Overflow = even faster logon times

Daniel (Follow on Twitter @djfeller)
Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6 VDI Handbook
XenApp Best Practices
XenApp Videos