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Project Virtual Reality Check (Project VRC) is pleased to announce the release of the long awaited ‘Phase V’ white paper which provides independent insights in the impact and best practices of various antivirus (AV) solutions on VDI performance.
The R&D project ‘Virtual Reality Check’ (VRC) was started in early 2009 by the Dutch IT companies PQR (www.pqr.com) and Login Consultants (www.loginconsultants.com) and focuses on research in the desktop virtualization market. Several white papers were published about the performance and best practices of different hypervisors, application virtualization solutions and Windows Operating Systems in server hosted desktop solutions.
This new white paper contains the test results of the VDI performance impact of the antivirus solutions from three leading vendors: McAfee, Microsoft and Symantec.
“When VDI is implemented into production, performance is often a serious issue. A performance impact of up to 40 percent is not unusual after antivirus is installed.” said Jeroen van de Kamp, CTO of Login Consultants “While this aspect has been less of an issue with PC’s or laptops, with performance sensitive environments like VDI it means you need to invest in servers and storage. This was the reason for us to investigate, and provide objective data about, the exact impact of antivirus on VDI”.
“It is important to highlight the fact that Project VRC does not evaluate the quality of the security features of the different AV products, but only provides information about the impact these solutions have on VDI performance” said Ruben Spruijt, CTO of PQR “By testing and comparing different solutions and configurations we discovered the best practice to perform a pre-scan of the master image before it’s deployed. The effect is huge and therefore highly recommended”.
Another key finding published in the white paper is that antivirus off-loading architectures makes a big difference from a storage IO point of view, but not always from a session density point of view.
All Project VRC tests are performed with Login VSI (www.loginvsi.com), the industry standard benchmarking tool for VDI. This software tool simulates typical user workloads to objectively test the performance of VDI and Server Based Computing environments. The full test methodology is described in the white paper.
This and all other Project VRC white papers can be downloaded for free at www.projectvrc.com. To keep up-to-date with the latest developments you can follow Project VRC on Twitter @ProjectVRC.
