UC Irvine

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments are a rapidly growing segment in the Mobile/Cloud Era. Compared to traditional enterprise desktop deployments, VDI can reduce the total cost of ownership by as much as 50%. However, the cost of powering a VDI deployment is still a significant IT expense. Typically these deployments consist of a complex system of interconnected server, storage and networking components. Thus, it is challenging to minimize energy consumption of the entire system while at the same time satisfying performance requirements. In this work, we first derive an accurate VDI performance model and then propose a hierarchical heuristic to minimize energy consumption without violating performance constraints. We also demonstrate that such an approach reduces algorithmic complexity significantly. Results from hardware experiments show that in scenarios with low consolidation ratios energy savings range from 3% to 6%, while for high consolidation ratios they range from 11% to 25%. In all cases, the measured end-to-end performance penalty is minimal.