More and more people ask advice about the hardware virtualization solutions, particularly in a Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure context. PQR and Login Consultants have decided to compare the various hardware virtualization platforms in relationship to the end-user performance experience using the freely available benchmarking methodology of Login Consultants, VSI. Jointly they will deliver the outcome of the investigations and benchmarks to a broader audience, as part of the joint venture 'Project: Virtual Reality Check (VRC)'.

Running Terminal Server workloads on virtual hardware is generally not recommended, but recent developments give grounds to a re-evaluation of current best practices. By bench¬marking these and the Virtual Desktop workloads on physical servers and various virtualization solutions, Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp will give you valuable and most importantly unbiased experience and insights.

Project VRC objectives

The goal of Project VRC is to investigate, validate and give answers to the following questions:

• *How does Windows XP compare to Vista as a virtual desktop?

• * How does a VDI infrastructure scale in comparison (virtualized) Terminal Server?

• *Which performance optimization on the host and guest virtualization level can be configured, and what is the impact of these settings on user density?

• *With the introduction of the latest hypervisor technologies, can we now recommend running large scale TS/CTX workloads on a virtualization platform?

• *How do the two usage scenarios compare, that is Microsoft Terminal Server (TS) only, versus TS plus XenApp?

• *How do x86 and x64 TS platforms compare in scalability on bare metal and virtualized environments?

• *What is the best way to partition (memory and vCPU) the Virtual Machines the hypervisor host, to achieve the highest possible user density?