Citrix MCS an overhead on IOPS ?

During some testing of some flash based storage i noticed something strange in my test results. 

Machines created with MCS (Machine Creation Services) seemed to not be able to perform as well as machines cloned full fat by the hypervisor. 

Conducting testing with IOMeter setup with a VDI type workload as detailed in another blog article we saw the IOPS saw the following results.

MCS Cloned Machine Peak IOPS 3500

VMware Cloned Machine Peak IOPS 40,000

This was using the same master image, on the same VLAN, on the same Hypervisor host. 

The MCS created machine was a dedicated VM type. 

The VM was assigned 3GB of RAM , 2vCPU and the disk size was 80GB

The storage was isolated for the tests. 

The test was repeated over a number of times to validate the result.

I understood that using linked cloning would have a slight overhead over a full fat VMDK file but did not realise the overhead could be as high as 10X

It should be noted that 3500 IOPS per desktop is still good enough to deliver a great experience to users, and the feature benefit of pooled.