The primary goal of Project Virtual Reality Check phase IV is to investigate the overall scalability impact of using 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, and Office 2007 was virtualized together with other applications.

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 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.

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

This 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. 

This excel sheet contains an overview of the tests published in the Project VRC phase II whitepaper. 

This whitepaper is a review and reflection on previous Project VRC publications, the benchmark: “Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI)” and Windows clock behavior within virtual machines.  This discussion is fueled by the fact that results from the individual Project VRC whitepapers are set side-by-side to compare hypervisors. Project VRC has been in discussion with both vendors and community, and performed additional research in this context. Before Project VRC can publish new results, it is important to address any questions, review the impact of this discussion and improve VSI where possible.