Desktop Virtualization Evaluation and Planning 

 

Delivering an Optimal Virtualization Environment with Real End User Experience Metrics

By capturing actual end user experience and application usage trends, Aternity’s Frontline Performance Intelligence platform measures the behavior and the resource consumption of each desktop application over time. The network behavior, screen refreshes, application chattiness, as well as metrics like CPU usage, Memory, and I/O are measured for each application, and are used to assess the amount of resources required from the virtual desktop server to support multiple users running a variety of different applications.

By utilizing the comprehensive end user experience metrics collected and analyzed in real-time


Click image to enlarge

An example of metrics generated by  Aternity that accurately evaluate projected real-world end user application experience for proposed VDI environment.

by the Aternity platform, an exact score of real-life application experience can be mapped onto the VDI which is being planned for implementation.

This mapping is performed without the need to run each application in each of the  virtualization platforms. The application behavior metrics collected are analyzed against a platform characteristics database which then predicts the behavior of the application for each applicable virtualization platforms. In addition, the virtualization densities and performance improvement offered by technologies such as IO accelerators, CPU virtualization instructions (e.g.: Intel’s VTd and VTx capable CPUs), and hardware investments can be quantitatively compared. Once the virtualization evaluation project is complete, the performance – both before and after the consolidation – can be compared.

The advantage of Aternity’s application-based monitoring approach is even more apparent when analyzing the main differences between server and desktop consolidation:

  • In the server world, the virtual server is identical to the physical server, and in most cases various physical-to-virtual utilities are used in order to transfer the server “as-is” to the virtual machine
  • The desktop is thus not transferred to the virtual machine; rather a new desktop is created with the necessary toolset and access to the user data
  • In the desktop world, the primary target of the desktop is to enable users to interact with enterprise applications and perform their duties in the most productive way possible – and all the rest may be safely discarded
  • When evaluating desktop virtualization, filtering the “noise” is essential for making a decision based on the performance of the business applications