Time flies

Early 2007 we, two competitors, community friends and fellow CTO’s, Jeroen van de Kamp and Ruben Spruijt, had a wild idea. There was a clear demand for unbiased and independent information in the world of Application and Desktop Virtualization, and there was a lack of an industry leading benchmarking platform. It was also time for a ‘Reality Check’ to the vendors who spread their server and desktop virtualization FUD all over the place.

We teamed-up, started working closer together and since we both love to get stuff done, we started a great and unique community ‘Project Virtual Reality Check’ and achieved awesome results both individually and as a team. Time flies when having fun and what a great adventure it has been. Every well managed project also has an end-date. For Project VRC and its successor TeamVRC this date is February 2016, the end of an era and the start of something new.

Which application in your enterprise uses the most resources on your VDI or RDS systems?  Is it something like AutoCAD, Photoshop, Visio, PowerPoint, or HD Video? These are often the applications that VDI architects and engineers worry about the most.  Sure, these applications can have a large footprint and you certainly need to size for them; however, the biggest resource pig that we often overlook is a common tool that is taken for granted; the web browser.

Starting today, ProjectVRC.team (in short: TeamVRC) has now evolved in to a community driven successor to ‘Project Virtual Reality Check’, originally initiated by Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp.

As a result, everyone can become a ProjectVRC.team Contributor with their own research. As long as the research topic is interesting and practically feasible, everyone can apply to publish content under ProjectVRC.team platform. Of course all ideas for publication suggestions must be verifiable, replicable, unbiased and independent. Expect an blog post soon that explains a bit more how this works in practice.

ProjectVRC.team is started with two new publications... 

In 2013 and early 2014 we released, with your input, the Project VRC 'State of the VDI and SBC union' community survey (download here). Over 1300 people participated. The results of this independent and truly unique survey have provided many new insights into the usage of desktop virtualization around the world.

At TechEd Europe 2014 in Barcelona, the independent research group Project Virtual Reality Check (Project VRC) announced the release of a publicly available white paper with performance results and best practices for Microsoft App-V 4.6 and 5.0. The white paper —based on lab environment testing— contains detailed App-V performance best practices that system administrators and IT managers in mid- to large-sized enterprises can apply to any new or existing App-V infrastructure.