In May this year EMC published an article titled: EMC Performance Optimization for Microsoft Windows XP for the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure – Applied Best Practices.
The 32 pages document, which is aligned with VMware documents covering these topics as well discusses how Windows XP should be configured for optimal performance in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementation.
The paper details how to configure the Windows XP subsystem to minimize the performance requirements on the shared storage and VMware ESX environment.
“…The current VDI platform of choice – Windows XP – was never meant to be deployed in the manner required to support a VDI use case. In its default state, the operating system (OS) performs various activities that cause unwanted overhead in a virtualized instance of the OS and it is critical to control the OS such that it is efficient and predictable
Planning and designing the storage infrastructure is a critical step because the shared storage must be able to absorb the bursts of input/output (I/O) that occur during the course of a day. A flaw in the design will lead to periods of erratic and unpredictable virtual desktop performance. Users can adapt to slow performance, but unpredictable performance is sure to quickly frustrate them.
To provide a predicatable performance to a VDI infrastructure, the storage should be able to handle the I/O load from the clients without causing excessive increases in the response time as measured by the user. This is difficult in VDI implementations due to the volatile nature of the workload…”
Thanks to Chad Sakac for pointing us to this paper.