Benchmark: Project Virtual Reality Check Phase III

Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants) and Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect at PQR) announced the release of phase 3 of their Virtual Reality Check benchmark.

This is the third version of the benchmark results which compares VDI workloads (Windows XP and Windows 7 virtual desktops) running on top of leading back-end hypervisors: VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. The first version was released in February last year and will continue to evolve in the future.

To measure the hypervisors performance they use the free of charge, Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI).

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.

Windows 7 has a much bigger disk footprint and consumes more memory than Windows XP. It would be reasonable to expect that Windows 7 requires more resources than Windows XP. Although this is certainly true, several tests in this whitepaper prove that Microsoft managed to optimize Windows 7 disk I/O behavior in specific phases of a desktop workload in comparison to Windows XP.

“…In the first I/O comparisons Windows 7 sometimes showed disappointing results, in every phase Windows 7 scored much more I/O’s than Windows XP. However, these first tests were performed only with the default VSI optimizations, which are designed for Windows XP workloads. It is clear the additional VRC optimization have a positive impact on the I/O’s. Surprisingly, after the VRC optimizations are applied, Windows 7 behaves better from an I/O point of view in the, logon, second loop and idle phases than Windows XP…”

In order to download the benchmark you will have to register at the Virtual Reality Check website.