Project Virtual Reality Check (ProjectVRC) have finally released their ‘Phase V’ white paper which provides an independent insight into the impact and best practices of various antivirus (AV) solutions on VDI performance.
We’ve referenced before at The Virtualization Practice findings from the ‘Virtual Reality Check’ (VRC) project. ProjectVRC was started in 2009 by Dutch IT companies PQR (www.pqr.com) and Login Consultants (www.loginconsultants.com) and focuses on research in the desktop virtualization market. The project has published several white papers on 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 (Move MultiPlatform 2.0, Agentless 2.5), Microsoft (Forefront EP 2010) and Symantec (Endpoint protection 12.1) in vSphere 5.0 and vSphere 4.1
A common concern for providing VDI environments is “what impact will my AV scanning have?“. AV scanning can have a significant impact on storage and compute costs. Having objective data is very useful in planning and optimization.
ProjectVRC’s remit wasn’t to find “the best” anti-virus solution: the whitepaper doesn’t look to comment on the quality of AV solutions. However, it does provide information on best practices to undertake when implementing AV in a VDI environment. One key finding is that antivirus off-loading architectures make a significant 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, an industry standard benchmarking tool for VDI. Login VSI simulates typical user workloads to objectively test the performance of VDI and Server Based Computing environments. The eagle-eyed among you will recall that Login VSI recently announced support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. ProjectVRC describe their full test methodology in the white paper.
This and all other Project VRC white papers can be downloaded for free once registered at www.projectvrc.com.
A recommended read.
Comments are closed.
It is nice to know what the implication is of various antivirus solutions on VDI performance but this test has almost no real life value because of two reasons.
1. They’ve tested a configuration which consists of a two year old version of VMware vSphere (4.1) and they’ve used an HP ProLiant DL380 G6 which was a good server 4 to 5 years ago but is an ancient piece of iron compared to today’s standards.
2. The workloads they’ve used are Outlook/Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2007 (most recent version 2013), Internet Explorer and Acrobat Reader. Besides the fact that the workloads are also based on outdated version, it’s also not a comparable real life workload. I would have liked to see social media type applications (FaceBook, Twitter, etc), some collaboration tools like SharePoint, softphone applications with the use of audio and audio/video.
So, it’s a nice first try but it only shows what the impact of AV products is on an 2+ years outdated infrastructure with no real life workloads. I hope they use up-to-date servers, vSphere and applications in version 2.0.
David,
Its fair to raise the points. I’d counter that that h/w in use is not dissimilar to hardware in use today. I’d also counter that while 2013 is the latest versionof Office – many organisations I come across are using 2007 today. While facebook and twitter are popular apps, they tend not to be popular business apps. Sharepoint is a web app for internal resources – so a web app. How would an audio redirection impact the concerns of AV? CPU use?
But as you say – and the document I think demonstrates, there is value testing. What is useful is the methodology is shown so you can tweak and amend as you see fit for your environment. There is also value in thinking about changing the configuration of AV settings for a VDI environment.
ultimately, as in any doc on scaling, ymmv.
Thanks for sharing.