Out now: New VRC paper "TS on next-gen hypervisors and hardware"

Written on Feb 16 2010 Filed under: Terminal Server, XenServer, vSphere, Hyper-v, Virtualization 2,768 views, 5 comments

by Jeroen van de Kamp

Wow, this took a little longer than expected. No.. actually this actually took a lot longer. Ruben Spruijt and I can finally announce the official release of the Project VRC Phase II white paper. This is the biggest release so far and is now available on Projects VRC’s dedicated website www.virtualrealitycheck.net.

This white paper focuses on Terminal Server workloads running on the latest generation Intel processor: the Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem). We did things a bit differently this time, as we now chose to publish the results of the big three hypervisors in a single paper. Ruben and I hope you will find this interesting, even though it should not come as a surprise that Intel’s Nehalem is a fantastic performer with virtualized TS workloads. (Although we still feel we have a couple of interesting angles.)

In this paper we tested Terminal Server 2003 (x86 an x64) workloads on the latest hypervisors from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware with the latest version of the Login VSI benchmark. We also discussed the impact of Office 2007 SP2, Internet Explorer IE7 versus IE8, Citrix CPU Fairshare, the impact of the vMMU settings in vSphere, and much more.

On a side note, Ruben and I learned a big lesson for future Project VRC papers: The next papers will not be this big anymore. There are so many interesting things we can investigate and report on, but is logistically too challenging to put so much in single paper. As a result, the next releases of the project VRC white papers should come at a higher interval. The upcoming series will not focus on TS anymore, but completely on VDI. Ruben and I are really looking forward to this as there are many fascinating topics we can investigate. (But more on this in the future.)

For now, Ruben and I hope you enjoy this latest chapter in the VRC story, and we're looking forward to your thoughts and feedback. You can follow Project VRC on twitter: “ProjectVRC”, “TheJeroen” & “rspruit”.

Comments

Arthur Chan wrote re: Out now: New VRC paper "TS on next-gen hypervisors and hardware"

on Tue, Feb 16 2010 7:43 AM

Thanks to Jeroen and Ruben for the hard work in producing this paper.  A tip on those using  DL380 G6 systems with DDR3-1333 DIMMs - in the BIOS options under Advanced Options/Advanced Performance Tuning Options, the option Memory Speed with 2 DIMMs per Channel needs to be set to 1333 MHz Maximum.

VMguy wrote re: Out now: New VRC paper "TS on next-gen hypervisors and hardware"

on Wed, Feb 17 2010 2:11 PM

Hello Jeroen,

Can you anticipate when will we see the VDI results ?

Ruben Spruijt wrote re: Out now: New VRC paper "TS on next-gen hypervisors and hardware"

on Wed, Feb 17 2010 4:20 PM

Our aim to release the  Project VRC phase III 'VDI' whitepaper is 4-6 weeks..

Mr. Incredible wrote re: Out now: New VRC paper "TS on next-gen hypervisors and hardware"

on Thu, Feb 18 2010 5:52 AM

Ruben - are there any plans to retest VDI once XS 5.6 is released?

Ruben Spruijt wrote re: Out now: New VRC paper "TS on next-gen hypervisors and hardware"

on Thu, Feb 18 2010 8:27 PM

We haven't planned this yet..

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