App-V 5 SMB Publishing Time OS compare

Table of Content

Testing methodology
Results
Conclusion

When migrating to a newer operating system will the App-V publishing time be different? When publishing times are important you don’t want to be surprised with increasing times. With the release of Windows 10 Technical Preview I was wondering if there is a difference in publishing times with Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. In this blog post I will share the result I collected in this research.

Testing methodology

This is tested within a small virtual environment running with Hyper-V on my laptop. The environment has the following VM’s:

AppV-Infra-01 - Domain Controller - Windows Server 2012
AppV-Server-01 - App-V Management / Publishing Server - Windows Server 2012 R2
AppV-Client-01 - App-V Client - Windows 7 Enterprise
AppV-Client-02 - App-V Client - Windows 8.1 Enterprise
AppV-Client-03 - App-V Client - Windows 10 Technical Preview

All three App-V client machines are running a x86 operating system and configured with 1 GB start-up memory with dynamical expanding memory enabled and 4vCPU’s.

App-V 5.0 SP2 Hotfix 5 is installed on each client VM and Windows Defender is disabled for performance reasons. No further optimization are applied.

On each client VM Autologon is configured with a domain user which has 8 App-V packages assigned to be published. All App-V packages are fault sequenced and streaming over SMB. The packages does not contain VC runtimes which can affect the publishing performance. For more information please read the following whitepaper.

After the user successfully logged on and the packages are published the times are collected with the tool GAP-IT which is running on AppV-Server-01. When GAP-IT is finished the following powershell script is used to remove all packages and reboots the VM.

Write-Host "Removing all App-V Packages..."

$appvPackages = Get-AppvClientPackage -All

Net stop AppVClient

$appvPackages | Remove-AppVClientPackage

Net Start AppVClient

Write-Host "Done going to reboot the machine..."

Start-Process -FilePath "Shutdown.exe" -ArgumentList "-r -t 00"

Each operating system is individually tested which means only the tested VM is running during collecting all the publishing times.

The testing cycle is repeated 5 times and the average times are used in the results.

Results

The following results show Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 are a bit faster compared to Windows 7.

The following chart will show the overall publishing time in a percentage bar chart. Here we can see Windows 8.1 is 4% faster and Windows 10 is 9% faster compared to Windows 7.

Conclusion

This research shows a newer operating system will result in a better publishing time when streaming over SMB. This can be related to the SMB protocol which is on Windows 7 SMB 2 and Windows 8.1 and higher SMB 3. So upgrading to a newer operating system will result is a slightly faster publishing time.

In an upcoming blog post I will share the results while streaming over HTTP.

Want to collect App-V publishing times in your environment? Check out GAP-IT here.

If you have a comment or question please leave them below.