The blog..

It is crazy how packed ones life is when coming back from over a week off the grid. No doubt the trip to Citrix Synergy was worth it, but it is always rough to get back.. anyway.. now i am looking forward to Pubforum Dublin 2009 which closing in rather fast now always a lot to do.

I have been spending quite a lot of time this week presenting news from the Synergy to customers around Denmark. And when it came to talks about the virtualization of XenApp and terminal services workloads i think we could all agree that there is a great need for objective performance tests to help guide us to choose the solutions best suited for the environment we are working with at the moment.

At Citrix Synergy in a Virtualization Congress session i had the pleasure of watching a presentation by Jerome and Ruben, two dutch CTP’s they presented the joint-venture between their two companies PQR and Login Consultants a project named Virtual Reality Check. The Project is awesome in two ways i think, first it provides a great view into their results from the tests they have done so far. Secondly the tool they have used to automate the workloads for the tests have been made available to the community.

The tool they are using to perform their tests is called VSI, Virtual Session Indexer.
The VSI tool is basically an automation of workloads and collection of the results to give a view into differences. The platform can both be used for performance tests, scalability test, but also as they clearly showed in their session, it can be used to spot challenges with new applications, updates or other changes to the platform. And by preparing it can be possible to avoid deploying a new update which will decrease performance of the infrastructure without having to effect the ‘physical’ users.

You can read more about VSI here: http://www.loginconsultants.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=210&Itemid=128

The tool can be downloaded from the Login Consultants download section.

Check out www.virtualrealitycheck.net to see the results of their tests so far.

/Rene Vester