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)

 

For more details about Memory Tiering visit my Memory Tiering Deep Dive Blog post 

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
Windows 11 24H2
CineBench 2024 as part of an AppVolumes package

The ESXi host has a total Memory load of 75% during the Benchmarks to ensure that the Tier 1 device (NVME SSD) is used.

The results show that memory tiering does not significantly reduce performance in extreme scenarios. The performance loss was at its maximum of 7%.

This suggests that there is almost no performance degradation in daily operations.