Memory Tiering on VDI workloads with Omnissa Horizon

As the demand physical dynamic random access memory (DRAM) continues to grow, it is required to handle its usage as efficiently as possible. Memory Tiering is the perfect feature by storing cold memory pages on NVME based SSD to extent ESXi-hosts DRAM. This post covers performance using Omnissa Horizon VDI environments.

 

Memory Tiering VDI basics

·        Use a NVME SSD in ESXi as a RAM expansion

·        vSphere 9 GA

·        Stores cold RAM pages of VMs onto the SSD

·        Default NVME to DRAM Ratio 1:1

·        Compatibility

o   Supports common vSphere Features

o   Not supported with GPUs (Reserve all Memory)

 

Memory Tiering Performance

Performance has been benchmarked using Omnissa Horizon 2506 and Windows 11 24H2

VM specs:

4 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM

Horizon and App Volumes Agent 2506

CineBench 2024

The ESXi hosts has a total Memory load of 75% during the Benchmarks

The results share that Memory Tiering doesn’t significantly reduce the performance. The performance remained almost the same during the benchmarks.