Vendors Support Project VRC
A year ago, Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp started Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) and released their independent, non-sponsored performance analysis that compared VMware ESX 3.5, Citrix XenServer 5.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V 2008. That comparison was designed to measure how the three hypervisors performed when running Windows XP and Vista virtual machines for Terminal Services and VDI environments.
According to Alessandro Perili of virtualization.info, the test was so valid that Citrix adopted the VRC methodology for measuring its XenDesktop 4 performance.
Spruijt is a Solution Architect and CTO at PQR, and van de Kamp is an Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants.
Now, the two are back, comparing VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1, Citrix XenServer 5.5 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V against their new workload simulator Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) 2.0.
"The most interesting thing is that all tests were performed on HP hardware equipped with the new Intel Xeon 5500 Series CPUs (codename Nehalem), and compared to Virtual Reality Check 1.0 results obtained on previous generation processors," Perili writes, adding that "Performance is almost doubled with both XenServer and vSphere, and with Hyper-V R2, performance is up 154 percent."
Burton Group Senior Analyst Chris Wolf supports VRC, saying "I'm a big fan of Ruben's work. I haven't seen any major objections to the way he went about assessing the workloads, and I think he's been pretty fair. To me, if you were to pick a standard for benchmarking those workloads, Project VRC is it."
Is Project VRC a threat to virtualization vendors? Send your comments to me at [email protected].
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/25/2010 at 12:48 PM