Support More Virtual Desktop Users and Perform Office Tasks 24% Faster by Selecting Microsoft® Azure® Ddsv5 Virtual Machines Over Ddsv4 Virtual Machines
Employees using virtual desktops to access their daily work can maintain focus better and ultimately get more done during the day if their system lets them move at their desired pace—without waiting. For organizations hosting virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in the cloud, the virtual machine configurations they select determine 1) the number of users that can access virtual desktops and 2) how well these desktops perform. To show the level of VDI performance that two general-purpose virtual machine (VM) options provide, we compared Microsoft Azure Ddsv5-series VMs enabled by 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors to Ddsv4-series VMs enabled by 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.
In these tests, Microsoft Azure Ddsv5 VMs enabled by 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors supported 12% more virtual desktop users while delivering 24% better overall performance for common office activities compared to Ddsv4 VMs with previous-generation processors. This advantage allows you to support more users on each VM, which reduces the number of VMs your organization must support while simultaneously providing faster performance for virtual desktop users.
Give Employees the Tools They Need to Finish Work Faster
The Login Enterprise benchmark tool from Login VSI simulates workers in a VDI environment performing common office tasks. First, we determined the maximum number of virtual desktop users each VM type could support and found that the new Ddsv5 VM supported 36 while the older Ddsv4 VM supported 32. Then, Login Enterprise captured the time it took those varying numbers of simulated users to log on and to carry out activities in the following Microsoft applications: Teams, Edge, Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
As Figure 1 shows, by choosing 16-vCPU Ddsv5 VMs with 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors over 16-vCPU Ddsv4 VMs with previous-generation processors, you can support 12% more virtual desktop users with overall 24% better performance. The 24% performance increase is the Geomean of all applications that Login Enterprise tests, representing common office tasks that a knowledge worker would access throughout the workday.
Figure 2 breaks down the relative speed the VMs took to complete each task during Login Enterprise testing, with the Ddsv5 VMs maintaining 36 users, and the Ddsv4 VMs maintaining 32 users. The new Ddsv5 VM was the same or faster at every task, ranging from 7% faster at Microsoft Edge tasks to 37% faster at completing Excel tasks. These tasks include actions such as opening and saving documents, loading web pages, and joining online meetings.
Conclusion
By selecting cloud VMs that support more users per instance, your business can spend less on cloud operating costs. Most importantly, choosing Microsoft Azure Ddsv5 VMs featuring 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors can provide more virtual desktop users a faster experience completing everyday tasks, which helps your team be more productive.
Learn More
To begin running your VDI workloads on Microsoft Azure Ddsv5 virtual machines with 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/ddv5-ddsv5-series.
Tests performed in January 2022 using Login Enterprise version 4.6.5 with Knowledge Worker workload with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams on Azure's East US zone using Windows 10 20H2 host pools with a max session limit of 120 users, breadth-first load balancing and premium SSDs. Standard D16ds v5 equipped with 16 vCPUs, 64GiB of RAM, 600GB of temp storage, Intel 8370C CPU. Standard D16ds v4 equipped with 16 vCPUs, 64GiB of RAM, 600GB of temp storage, Intel 8272CL CPU.