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Performance stories on BrianMadden.com

We're all performance tuners at heart, and we'd all like our VDI environments to get as many users as possible and to perform as well as possible. So here are some starting points for you:

  • ControlUp - The free management tool I wish I had when I was a full-time admin

    Have you heard of ControlUp yet? Smart-X, its creator, has received a bit of press lately for it due to it's simple, unique approach to monitoring and management. I had a chance to meet with Yoni Avital and Asaf Ganot when I was at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona...
    by Gabe Knuth on December 08, 2011 : 5 comments , 4,351 views
  • The impact of Application Virtualization solutions in VDI, THE Reality Check

    We ( Sven Huisman , Jeroen van de Kamp and Ruben Spruijt ) are pleased to announce the long awaited release of the Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) Phase IV whitepaper. As promised: this one does a true deep dive on Application Virtualization in VDI...
    by Ruben Spruijt on June 15, 2011 : 4 comments , 8,434 views
  • System Performance: It's (still) time to change the timers!

    While working on my presentation for BriForum on Perceived Performance, I was reminded of another performance related white paper that I wrote seven years ago titled It's Time to Change the Timers , which was about the need to change the basic system...
    by Tim Mangan on April 13, 2011 : 4 comments , 3,693 views
  • A closer look at the new "Dynamic Memory" feature of Hyper-V: is it worth it for VDI?

    Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 will introduce two major new features: RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory. I've written about RemoteFX before (as has Brian ), so today's focus is Dynamic Memory (from the VDI perspective). We'll also...
    by Michel Roth on January 27, 2011 : 23 comments , 14,140 views
  • TechEd Notes: Microsoft expects 40% increase in VDI User Density using Dynamic Memory & Hyper-V

    At the TechEd 2010, Microsoft has been busy talking about things like Azure and Office365, SaaS and PaaS, and all things cloud. But in they keynote yesterday, there was a spattering of desktop stuff. Nothing earth-shattering, unless you count a 40% increase...
    by Gabe Knuth on November 10, 2010 : 9 comments , 5,058 views
  • Project VRC: a deep dive into VDI performance tuning

    Ruben and I are pleased to announce we finally can release the long awaited Phase III whitepaper. As promised: this one does a true VDI deep dive. We think we have interesting new content, and more importantly, many new insights. More and more organizations...
    by Jeroen van de Kamp on September 27, 2010 : 9 comments , 8,166 views
  • MMS wrap-up: XenApp integration into SCCM, Dynamic Memory, and RemoteFX

    Last week, I attended the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas, which is a show that neither Brian nor I have ever attended. In the past, we looked at it as a server management conference, just outside of the scope of what we cover on BrianMadden...
    by Gabe Knuth on April 27, 2010 : 2 comments , 4,450 views
  • Quick and Dirty Performance Analysis, a video from BriForum 2009

    Presented by Ian Parker, Senior Web Services Administrator, ThomsonReuters Performance analysis can be a complicated, difficult and even obscure topic. If you are faced with an urgent performance issue, it can be very difficult to gather relevant performance...
    by BriForum Video on April 27, 2010 : 0 comments , 2,212 views
  • Confirmed: VMware buys every part of RTO Software except what they owe Citrix. Here's our full analysis.

    A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about the fact that Symantec had suddenly stopped selling their Workspace Profiles product which they OEM'ed from RTO Software. I wondered why this was, and suggested that perhaps it was because Symantec competitor...
    by Brian Madden on February 24, 2010 : 22 comments , 11,790 views
  • Best practices for virtualizing terminal servers, from Project VRC Phase 2

    Ruben and I are getting close to the release of the Project VRC phase 2 white paper. (Here's a primer on Project VRC if you haven't heard of it.) Although we've been discussing and presenting the best practices from the first paper around...
    by Jeroen van de Kamp on January 09, 2010 : 10 comments , 7,592 views
  • Yowza! 20% of the companies in our space have a monitoring solution!

    Yesterday, I was going through the list of vendors in our space, checking out websites and seeing who had anything that was notable or really interesting. About halfway through, I noted that there are an awful lot of vendors that have monitoring solutions...
    by Gabe Knuth on October 28, 2009 : 5 comments , 2,761 views
  • Sequencing With Tim Mangan Episode 9 is now available

    I've posted a new episode of " Sequencing With Tim Mangan ", an occasional series looking at the Microsoft App-V product in action. In this episode, we look at sequencing the latest version of Camtasia Studio from TechSmith . I use Microsoft...
    by Tim Mangan on September 03, 2009 : 0 comments , 3,041 views
  • RedHat SPICE vs RDP vs ICA performance video

    I realized as I was writing today's VDIworks article that we never published the performance videos that we recorded last year when we visited Qumranet's (now Red Hat's) offices in the Bay Area. The information we got is very interesting,...
    by Gabe Knuth on June 18, 2009 : 18 comments , 30,487 views
  • Who's using the Citrix Branch Repeater?

    It's not meant to be a condescending question, "Who's using the Citrix Branch Repeater?" I really just want to know who's got it and how they use it. Since I first heard about the device sometime last year (or was it the year before...
    by Gabe Knuth on April 13, 2009 : 3 comments , 10,181 views
  • HyperV_Mon: a new free tool if you use Hyper-V

    If you use Hyper-V, or any OS virtualization platform, you know that you can't trust the Windows Task Manager from inside the VMs to tell you squat. Basically, the virtualization layer pulls the rug out from under the guest OS when it comes to CPU...
    by Tim Mangan on March 11, 2009 : 12 comments , 8,018 views
  • Citrix creates the "HDX" brand to compete against those who say they 'just' have ICA

    Citrix's big announcement last week was about the release of XenDesktop version 3 . But there were some other smaller announcements too that many people missed, including the one about Citrix creating a new brand called "HDX." ( citrix.com...
    by Brian Madden on February 12, 2009 : 13 comments , 10,460 views
  • VDI and TS performance on ESX, Hyper-V, Xen, and bare-metal: head-to-head results are here via Project Virtual Reality Check!

    Jeroen van de Kamp and I are proud to finally announce the official launch of project "Virtual Reality Check” (VRC). This is a independent research joint venture between our companies--Login Consultants and PQR. The primary purpose of VRC is...
    by Ruben Spruijt on January 25, 2009 : 10 comments , 12,451 views
  • Ericom's True Media Experience, or Reverse Seamless Windows

    Earlier this week, I had a briefing with Ericom and came away with an interesting bit of information about their upcoming PowerTerm Webconnect release. "True Media Experience," which uses a technology developed by Ericom called Reverse Seamless...
    by Gabe Knuth on December 17, 2008 : 11 comments , 4,281 views
  • XenApp 5 Feature Profile: Preferential Load Balancing

    What is Preferential Load Balancing? Preferential Load Balancing (PLB) is a new feature included in XenApp 5 (Platinum only) that uses administrator-configured levels of importance to assign more or less CPU cycles to users and/or applications. For instance...
    by Gabe Knuth on December 03, 2008 : 0 comments , 7,635 views
  • Login Consultants release another beta of their freeware TS and VDI benchmarking tool

    Last July, Login Consultants released an early beta version of an upcoming freeware tool called Login VSI. This tool is a Windows desktop benchmarking tool that runs a series of workload simulations and produces a relative performance score. The idea is that you'd use Login VSI to test various hardware configurations (Would that extra 4GB RAM make a difference?) or to see what the impact would be of going VDI (How much more hardware would I need to support the same number of users with the same scores as I can do now with TS?).

    ...
    by Jack Madden on September 24, 2008 : 6 comments , 4,987 views
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