Benchmarks: ESX vs XenServer vs Hyper-V for Terminal Services and VDI workloads

Last week a couple of well-known and respected virtualization experts, Ruben Spruijt (Solution Architect and CTO at PQR) and Jeroen van de Kamp (Enterprise Architect and CTO at Login Consultants), launched a remarkable project called Virtual Reality Check.

The non-sponsored joint effort produced a set of valuable benchmark comparisons between VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V, when running Windows XP and Vista virtual machines for Terminal Services and VDI environments:

To measure the hypervisors performance they used the recently released, free of charge, Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI) and performed over 150 tests.

The best part of the documents released so far is that they carefully analyze the impact of several configuration changes for each hypervisor, suggesting which setup is the most performing.

If you are planning a VDI infrastructure the performance analysis these virtualization professionals redacted is a mandatory reading.

By the way: Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp will speak at the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress 2009, in Las Vegas.

On stage the two will discuss the results, unveil additional details that were not published and preview the upcoming new tests.
Additionally, they will teach how to setup a benchmarking facility using Login VSI.

Be sure to check their presentation abstract here.