Project VRC Phase II:
Latest generation virtualization techniques doubles capacity terminal servers
With that statement Ruben and Jeroen have just released Phase II of Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) to create this whitepaper they have done more than 150 tests with Login VSI to measure the performance of servers while being stressed by a great amount of simulated users. This whitepaper has a few advantages to whitepapers published by the vendors themselves and whitepapers published by blogs that are only testing one hypervisor:
- The whitepaper is truly independent
- The whitepaper is approved by the different vendors
- Everybody can repeat the tests with the free available Login VSI
- The authors aren’t biased
- You can compare the results easily (the servers have been stressed the same way)
One of the most interesting conclusions of Phase II: The performance increase measured is not caused by improvements to the hypervisor but mainly by Intel’s innovations in the Nehalem architecture VRC states that it can be almost solely accredited for the performance improvements seen with TS workloads.
Get your free copy of the whitepaper at www.projectvrc.com
Independent benchmarking
Wohoo!! When we where creating Login VSI we had a few goals in mind, one of them is becoming the de facto standard for benchmarking virtual environments (TS/VDI/Bare metal etc). And i have to say: something is happening in the industry. To begin with we have Project VRC by Ruben and Jeroen but recently Citrix published some rather interesting whitepapers.
- Official Citrix Whitepaper with 5000 XenDesktop users. http://bit.ly/c5a0n5
Use free and reputable tools like LoginVSI from Login Consultants to simulate real-worldlike
user workloads.
- Official Citrix Whitepaper Single server scalability with XenDesktop http://bit.ly/b4MH75
VM density results are highly dependent upon workload characteristics. We used a
workload called Login VSI, created by an independent company, Login Consultants.
Login VSI, is well known in the VDI and terminal services community with testing of
8 various terminal services and VDI solutions from multiple vendors in a comprehensive,
ongoing test project called Project Virtual Reality Check.
AutoIT is enterprise ready!?
In IT everybody i meet always has something against AutoIT, this is for a obvious reason you don’t want to use recorded mouseclicks or sendkeys to install your applications unless there is really (no really!) no other option left.
In everyday usage i use AutoIT to create most parts of Login VSI, its perfect for emulating the user workloads because it works like a real user and because i dont have real programming skills the rest of VSI is also created in AutoIT script.
You would think a large company would do this a little different, maybe they would create the workloads in AutoIT scripts but creating the configuration GUI’s would be done much more professional…. Well VMWare dissagrees 
apparently.
Conclusion: +1 for the AutoIT team and –1 for VMware!
Citrix Edgesight will break march 25th
Well it’s always nice to know when you production environment will break, i wish i knew this for all software running in my environment 
. But it doesn't look really professional from the vendor side. And this time the vendor is: Citrix!
As of 2010-03-25 (March 25th, 2010), EdgeSight 5.0 and 5.1 (all service packs) will stop functioning.
Customers will receive the following error message for payload uploads:
“Archive load error: The archive '/edgesight/app/suser/ZRemoteLib.zpd#12!lsync.htm' is not appropriately signed. The system cannot find the file specified.”
General symptoms: Payloads will not be uploaded and many of the EdgeSight components will not work properly resulting in different errors.
Congratz to Citrix for reintroducing a bug the already discovered in version 4.5 of their software product!