Paper: Project Virtual Reality Check Phase IV

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Sven Huisman, technical consultant at PQR, Jeroen van de Kamp, Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants and Ruben Spruijt, Technology Officer at PQR just announced a new paper titled: Project VRC: Phase IV. The paper which contains 38 pages gives some valuable insight on the impact of using Application Virtualization in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment.

The three biggest and most commonly used application virtualization solutions in the VDI market space are investigated: Citrix Application Streaming, Microsoft App-V and VMware ThinApp. To measure the performance impact of these solutions on VDI, Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) was used.

Several scenario’s were tested on Desktop VMs, running on top of VMware vSphere 4.1 and using VMware View 4.5 to deploy the VMs. On top of that several scenario’s were tested:

  • App-V Scenarios:
    • App-V with preloaded cache
    • App-V with preloaded cache and client in offline mode
    • App-V using HTTP streaming
    • App-V using RTSP streaming
    • App-V using RTSP streaming and compressed packages
    • App-V using RTSP streaming and a shared read-only cache
  • ThinApp Scenarios:
    • ThinApp 4.5 with packaged applications on the local drive of the golden image
    • ThinApp 4.5 with packaged applications on a network share
    • ThinApp 4.6 with packaged applications on the local drive of the golden image
    • ThinApp 4.6 with packaged applications on a network share
    • ThinApp 4.6 with compression set to fast and optimization set to disk
  • Application Streaming Scenarios:
    • Application Streaming 6 running the applications precached without XenApp servers using raderun.exe
    • Application Streaming 6 running the applications non-precached with a cachesize of 1 GB
    • Application Streaming 6 running the applications non-precached with a cachesize of 5 GB

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Based on these scenario’s both the impact on the maximum number of users that can be hosted on a VDI host, the impact on application responsiveness and the impact on IO were measured.

Some of the conclusions:

Test results show that Application Virtualization has impact on the VDI user density, which can be decreased by 20% to 45% when Office 2007 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%.

And

The storage impact on read and write IO was also investigated and the general conclusion is that streaming applications will decrease the read IOs by 20% to 44% and increase the write IOs by 20% to 44%. From a management point of view, choosing for demand application streaming as the delivery method brings considerable management benefits and will offload read I/O’s. However, the impact on write I/O’s should not be neglected.

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