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Outcome phase II Project VRC: latest generation virtualization technology doubles Terminal Server workload capacity

PQR and Login Consultants combine their strength in Project VRC, to benchmark workloads for Terminal Server (TS) on the latest hardware and virtualization software

De Meern/Amsterdam, 1 February 2010 – PQR and Login Consultants launch the results of phase II of the independent research project ‘Virtual Reality Check’ (VRC). Based on 150 new tests, Login and PQR present their findings on the influence of hardware and virtualization software on the performance of TS and Citrix XenApp, in a new whitepaper: ‘Project VRC: Phase II’.

The Research & Development project ‘Virtual Reality Check (VRC), the Platform Performance Index’ was started early 2009 by Login Consultants and PQR. Goal of the project is analyze the developments in the application and desktop virtualization market and to present the outcomes as objective as possible.

Initiators Jeroen van de Kamp, CTO Login Consultants, and Ruben Spruijt, Technical Officer at PQR, now present – as a result of 150 additional tests – the latest findings in the whitepaper ‘Project VRC: Phase II’.  The document shows the impact of Terminal Servers on the performance of the latest hardware and hypervisors in the (virtualization) market. Spruijt comments: ‘During the second phase of the VRC project, I was surprised by the significant economies of scale, which was made possible by the new processor architecture. Without any change in the hypervisors, this lead to the a 100% increase of possible concurrent users. This is very promising for the future! Van de Kamp adds: “We see that hardware plays a significant part in the increase in scale. A little under two years ago we were careful to virtualize Terminal Servers and XenApp, but this has changed fundamentally. Project VRC’s outcomes substantiate that.

Phase I of the project did not compare hypervisors, but described their behavior in separate whitepapers. The market obviously did compare the outcomes of the different whitepapers, which is why we decided to take up the outcomes of Phase II in one single document. The hypervisors VMware vSphere 4, Citrix XenServer 5.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V2.0 have been tested on HP ProLiant DL380G6 servers equipped with Intel ’Nehalem’ Xeon 5500 processors. The Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) 2.1 made this possible. This product independent benchmark tool for  Terminal Servers  and Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, indexes the performance, base4d on the number of simultaneous working sessions on 1 machine (either virtual or physical; the number of operating systems is leading) . By doing so each platform is tested in an identical way.

People who have an interest in the project can, besides comparing the test results, also execute the tests by themselves. The used testing environment and methods are covered in the whitepaper. The VSI 2.1 tool is freely downloadable through the Login Consultants website

The Whitepaper ‘Project VRC: phase II’ is available for download via www.virtualrealitycheck.net.

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