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Phase IV whitepaper now available |
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The primary goal of Project Virtual Reality Check phase IV is to investigate the overall scalability impact of Application Virtualization solutions within VDI. The three biggest and most commonly used vendors in the VDI market space are investigated: Citrix Application Streaming, Microsoft App-V and VMware ThinApp. These three solutions were compared in different streaming configurations. This whitepaper does a true deep dive on Application Virtualization impact within VDI.
Depending on the use case scenario, Project VRC discovered that this impact can be significant. Test results show that Application Virtualization has impact on the VDI user density, which can be decreased by 20% to 45% when Office is completely virtualized. This should be considered as a worst case scenario. When only a couple of specific (business) applications is virtualized, the session density decreases by only 3 to 12%. In practice the Application Virtualization overhead will be highly dependent on how often virtualized applications are started, and how much file IO and registry access they generate: specifically the creation of the virtualization ‘bubble’/environment for the application can have a significant overhead.
The Project VRC phase IV whitepaper "Application Virtualization Impact on VDI" is available for download here. |
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Phase III whitepaper now available |
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More and more organizations are planning a move to VDI. Experience in many VDI projects has proven so far that the performance and sizing issues are still a major hurdle to overcome. Often, VDI results are disappointing because the VDI environment is not properly sized and tuned. In practice, storage remains the number one challenge in today’s VDI deployments.
In this whitepaper Windows XP and Windows 7 are extensively compared. Specifically, the I/O behavior of Windows XP and Windows 7 is investigated in detail. By evaluating the different phases of a desktop workload, completely new insights are given.
Many best practices are available to optimize Windows 7. Project VRC performed tests with the default optimizations configured by Login VSI (referred in this document as ‘VSI optimizations’) and additional optimization best practices that are specific to Windows 7 (referred as ‘VRC optimizations’). Both from an I/O and VSImax (maximum capacity) perspective, these ‘VRC optimizations’ proved to have a significant positive impact.
Project VRC also investigated the performance impact of topics like ‘Page file configuration’, ‘Address Space Layout Randomization’, ‘VM logging’, ‘ESXTOP’, ‘1 vs 2 vCPU’s’, ‘ESX 4.0u2 vs ESX 4.1’, and ‘Overcommitting Memory’. There are many lessons to be learned here, but the impact of disabling ASLR was striking. It is difficult to blindly recommend disabling such an important security feature, but the impact is large enough to consider it.
All tests were performed with either vSphere 4.0 U2 or 4.1 as the hypervisor and all VDI tests were performed using View 4.0. Apart from specific recommendations for vSphere, all Windows related conclusions are valid for any kind of hypervisor or VDI solution.
The Phase III whitepaper is now available in the download section. |
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Update: Project VRC Phase II version 2.0 |
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Project VRC released their Phase II whitepaper in February 2010. Project VRC phase II focuses completely on virtualizing terminal server workloads on the latest generation hardware and hypervisors.
After the release of the Phase II whitepaper, Project VRC received and vSphere patch from VMware. This update specifically addresses Hyper-threading performance of TS workloads on VMware vSphere 4.0.
Project VRC now releases an updated whitepaper: Project VRC Phase II, version 2.0. This whitepaper is available for download from: www.virtualrealitycheck.net.
In this whitepaper contains new tests, comparing TS workloads on VMware vSphere 4.0, Citrix XenServer 5.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V R2:
The main updated findings of “Project VRC Phase II version 2.0” whitepaper are:
•Considerable vSphere performance increase with VMware vSphere patch
•Update on best practices and recommended configuration
•Investigated: performance impact ASLR
The Phase II version 2.0 whitepaper is now available in the download section.
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Out now: Project VRC phase 2 |
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This new Project VRC phase 2 whitepaper focuses completely on analyzing Terminal Services (TS) workloads running on the latest generation hardware and hypervisors. While in phase 1 of project VRC VMware ESX3.5, Citrix XenServer 5.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 were tested on a HP DL385G5 with AMD “Barcelona” processors, this whitepaper reviews vSphere 4.0, XenServer 5.5 and Hyper-V 2.0 running on HPDL380G6 with Intel “Nehalem” processor.
Project VRC made a deliberate choice not to directly compare Hypervisors in phase 1 (and published results in separate whitepapers), the community and the vendors, logically, did. Therefore, we decided that Project VRC will release this single whitepaper for the phase 2 results, including the three hypervisors.
The Phase II whitepaper is now available in the download section.
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Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) is a joint venture of Login Consultants and PQR, who have researched the optimal configuration for the different available hypervisors (hardware virtualization layers). The project arises from the growing demand for a founded advice on how to virtualise Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop (VDI) workloads. Through a number of researches, Login Consultants and PQR show you the scaling possibilities for Terminal Server environments as well as Virtual Desktops. 
Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) is een gezamenlijke initiatief van Login Consultants en PQR waarbij onderzoek is gedaan naar de optimale configuratie voor de verschillende hypervisors (hardware virtualisatielagen). Het project is onder andere ontstaan uit de groeiende vraag naar een onderbouwd advies over het virtualiseren van Terminals server en Virtual Desktop (VDI) workloads (werkbelastingen). Aan de hand van een serie onderzoeken tonen PQR en Login Consultants aan wat de mogelijkheden zijn in schaalbaarheid voor Terminal Server omgevingen en Virtual Desktops. 
Das Projekt Virtual Reality Check (VRC) ist ein Joint Venture der Login Consultants und PQR welche die optimale Konfiguration für die verschiedenen verfügbaren Virtualisierungs-Layer erforscht haben. Dieses Projekt entstand aus der wachsenden Nachfrage über grundlegende Informationen, nach der Auslastung bei der Virtualisierung von Terminal Server und Virtual Desktop (VDI). Durch eine große Reihe von Analysen, können Ihnen Login Consultants und PQR die Skalierbarkeit von Terminal Server-Umgebungen sowie virtuellen Desktops aufzeigen.
