The blog..

Even though i am a bit slow as i was away on holiday i wanted to let you know that the Virtual Reality Check performed by PQR and Log-in Consultants as a joined venture has been released!

The Virtual Reality Check is a great performance baseline giving the community the option to compare Citrix XenServer, VMware ESX 3.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V.

The objectives for the VRC has been:

• How does various Microsoft Windows Client OS’s  scale as a virtual desktop?
• How does a VDI infrastructure scale in comparison (virtualized) Terminal Server?
• Which performance optimization on the host and guest virtualization level can be configured, and what is the impact of these settings on user density?
• With the introduction of the latest hypervisor technologies, can we now recommend running large scale TS/CTX workloads on a virtualization platform?
• How do the two usage scenarios compare, that is Microsoft Terminal Server [TS] only, versus TS plus XenApp?
• How do x86 and x64 TS platforms compare in scalability on bare metal and virtualized environments?
• What is the best way to partition (memory and vCPU) the Virtual Machines the hypervisor host, to achieve the highest possible user density?

I think the PQR and Log-in team has done an excellent job that we all can benefit from. The materials and results can be reviewed at www.virtualrealitycheck.net i would encourage anyone working with any of these technologies to have a look at the findings.

However i still think that any experience and performance measurement which is done should be announced, the VRC is a comprehensive test and my guess is there will not be many of those, but i am sure Ruben, Jerome and the team would also love to hear from others who have experiences in these areas.

Rene Vester