I’ve been blogging a lot this year on the merits of Citrix Workspace Environment Management (WEM) and the various features it provides. Another feature is I/O Priority – which enables us to manage the priority of I/O operations for a specified process:
To demonstrate this, I am going to run IOMeter (a storage testing tool – that consumes, but also measures CPU utilisation during testing), and SuperPi (a tool that calculates Pi to a specified number of digits – and consumes large amounts of CPU during calculation).
Before making any WEM configuration changes, on my virtual desktop the results are as follows:
IOMeter (Using the Atlantis Template – available here) – shows 6.56% CPU Utilisation, and 3581 I/Os per second:
SuperPI calculation to 512K – 7.1 seconds:
Next I added the IOMeter and SuperPi executables into WEM, and set the priority to very low:
As a result of doing this the IOMeter results are significantly reduced, and the calculation time for SuperPi has increased significantly:
IOMeter Result – around 60% reduction in I/O per second, and 2% CPU usage reduction:
SuperPI – time to calculate has increased by nearly 200%:
From this test – it is clear to see that I/O Management within Workspace Environment Management is an effective way to control the I/O operations of specified processes. Whilst you might think slowing down the performance of an application is unlikely to be a major requirement for many of us – the ability to control particularly resource intensive applications is a definite win for complex environments. If a particular application is causing performance problems (for example degrading the performance for others) then this provides a suitable solution to manage that process.