VDI benchmarking – Login VSI 3.6

I been working with VDI deployments for some time now.  One of the hardest thing to do is try to determine and estimate the VDI infrastructure sizing and how performance behaves with different types of Hypervisors.  Searching the net and reading documents benchmark from other manufacturers, I discovered  Login VSI  (Virtual Session Indexer) which is a tool that is  becoming a standard for VDI roll outs.

This tool provides valuable information on the maximum number of sessions that can be held by the servers in the data center. In this new version the integrated Client Side Performance Testing , is able to measure end to end user experience in VDI environments, taking into consideration: response time, capacity WAN lines, the effect of different remote protocols and acceleration solutions for the WAN.

The tests performed with Client Side Performance Testing are:

• Character Response – How long does a letter appear on the screen from pressing on the keyboard using the protocol used?
• Long Text Response – How long does it to show up on screen a long block of text using the protocol used?
• Response mouse click – How long it take to register and make a mouse click in a remote session?
• Image quality and load time – How long does it take to display a complex image using the protocol used? This image has been specifically designed to measure the quality and speed of different protocols regardless of medium.

With this new feature we ask the following questions facing our VDI infrastructure:

• If we increase the number of users on a single server or group of servers, how sensitive the impact on the protocol side facing the customer?
• If we change the server side rendering client side, what is the impact on the consumption of bandwidth and therefore the response of the protocol?
• What is the real effect of WAN accelerators in the response time at the end point (without caching = real results?)

As you can see the tool provides enough information and will give a detailed overview of our infrastructure VDI performance level. The following studies provide several different manufacturers using this tool:

• VMware View .
• Citrix XenDesktop .
• Quest vWorkspace .

I hope that this tool can be helpful!