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!
Login VSI 2.0 Released
Mark just gave me the heads up that he and Jeroen released Login VSI 2.0!!
I would like to congratulate Mark and Jeroen on this awesome achievement! You guys can be proud of yourselves!!!
The beta 3 was very well received, just a couple minor fixes were required, and we updated the documentation. In comparison to VSI 1.0 we made tremendous improvements in the overall quality and reliability of VSI.
Feel free to mention this on your website (if you think this is interesting of course). We do not have an official press release, but for your convenience we made a summary you can use:
Login Consultants releases the brand new and free VSI 2.0, a specifically designed benchmark for SBC and VDI environments. VSI loads the system with simulated user workload, and focuses on how much users can run on the system before it saturates. VSI is 100% platform and protocol independent, and VSI configuration is simplified and automated where possible. As a result, VSI is a turn-key benchmark solution: perform tests within days instead of weeks. No need to create the workloads first. VSI is intended to be used by VDI/SBC engineers/admins, a degree in testing methodologies is not required.
VSI 2.0 introduces new workloads, and an improved indexing method: VSImax. Overall, VSI 2.0 will be a much smoother experience in comparison to VSI 1.0, many best practices and lessons learned from project VRC are now included in this release. The free version is called “VSI 2.0 Express”, the advanced version is “VSI 2.0 PRO”.
The most important 2.0 features are:
- Completely new, more realistic, medium workload
- Support for IE8, Office 2010, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2
- Highly improved robustness (even under extreme loads)
- Improved response timer mechanism and index: VSImax
- Over 100 fixes and usability improvements
- Multilanguage Support (PRO only)
- Other workloads such as: light, heavy and multimedia (PRO only)
- External clock calibration and response time measurement (PRO only)
- Customization Support (PRO only)
Login VSI can be downloaded from Login VSI download section
Login VSI 2.0 Beta 3
Being one of the developers of Login VSI of course i have to want to post something about it, but since we at IThastobeCool want to give you something special i decided to create a video of what Login VSI really does.
The video shows you the “Medium” user workload of Login VSI Express (read: Free) in this session we measure user experience by timing window events. You can imagine running this test with one user does not tell you the performance of the server but look what happens when you add 287!
“Login VSI 2.0 is the second iteration of Login VSI 1.0: the free and specifically designed benchmark for SBC and VDI environments. VSI 2.0 introduces completely new workloads, and a improved and more accurate index called VSImax. Overall, VSI 2.0 will be a much smoother experience, many best practices and lessons learned from project VRC are now included in this release. The free version will now be called “Login VSI 2.0 Express”, the advanced version is called “Login VSI 2.0 PRO”. The most important new 2.0 features are:
Workload(s) re-build from scratch
· New, more realistic, medium workload (now 10 instead of 18 minutes)
· Real-world end-user websites (with rich flash content)
· Windows 7 and Windows 2008 r2 support
· IE 8 support
· New Zip and PDF printer (BullZip)
· Highly improved robustness (even under extreme loads)
· Improved response timer mechanism and index: VSImax
VSI 2.0 PRO features
· Multilanguage Support (Express only support English OS and Office)
· Detailed logging
· Runtime calibration of timed events and response time measurement using an external SQL server clock (important for hypervisor comparisons)
· Office 2003 and Office 2010 support
· Customization Support (ad your own apps to the VSI workload)
Analyzer Changes
· New VSImax calculation: much more precise
· Automatic renaming of excel files to “testname.xltm”
· Remember settings from last session
AD Setup Changes
· Split system / user policy objects / added Computers OU
· Improved setup user objects (no password expiry etc)
Launcher
· New pre-launch naming of test: no more archiving of tests needed
Login VSI beta can be downloaded from Login VSI download section.
Login VSI 2 – It’s alive!!!
Long awaited and almost here: Login VSI 2.0 after the successes with Login VSI 1.0 and Project Virtual Reality Check we just had to go 2.0, so we dusted off our development machines and testing environment and got working. The first thing we did was gather all bugs annoyances and feature requests that we received when Login VSI 1.0 was released, together with our own best practices and experiences we had a good foundation to start on a solid new version.
At this moment the beta is available for a limited number of test users, these are employees of all the major virtualization vendors, Citrix CTP’s and a number of hand picked VSI 1.0 customers. Do you think you can convince me to also invite you to the beta ? Please drop a line in the comments!
Next you will find a short list of what i think are the most important changes on VSI *note some off these features are not free but Login VSI 2 will also be available in a full functional free version.
· New workloads (Light/Medium/Heavy/Multimedia)
· Informative progress bar during workload execution
· New external clock using SQL for reference purposes (Pro Only)
Analyzer
- Setup supports network installations
- New VSImax calculation: much more precise
- Automatic renaming of excel files to “testname”
Target/workload build from scratch
- New medium and multimedia workload (now 12 instead of 18 minutes)
- More multimedia
- New websites
- Zip support
- 2008 R2 Compatible PDF printer
- IE 8 support
- More reliable than the 1.0 release: “stuck” sessions reduced to minimum
- New timer mechanism (without sleeps to improve measurements in VM’S)
- External reference clock using SQL
- Detailed debug logging
- All configuration moved to central location
Active directory
- Fixed policies for 2003 AD
- Split system / user policy objects
- Added Computers OU
- Improved setup user objects ( no password expiry etc)
- Streamlined minor setup bugs
Launcher
- New pre-launch naming of test: no more archiving of test needed
As you can see we made a lot of changes, as soon as the beta goes public (this should happen shortly!) i will go into more detail on specific funtions and possibilities with VSI.