Evaluator Group Inc. announces the first industry storage benchmark for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), the VDI-IOmark. Over the past year Evaluator Group has assisted IT organizations establish requirements for full scale out VDI environments. Part of every project has been a Proof of Concept (POC) to determine expected IO performance and related storage costs. Evaluator Group, on working with available testing tools found current VDI benchmarks measure CPU, memory and I/O capabilities but do not stress the storage characteristics of the infrastructure. To fully stress and predict user experience a costly full scale out POC was required.

VDI-IOmark was developed by Evaluator Group, working with industry experts in benchmarking, storage systems and VDI deployments. Evaluator Group developed in collaboration with storage vendors, creating a foundation membership within the VDI-IOmark organization, in order to ensure all measurements and results fairly and accurately measure storage performance.

"The VDI-IOmark will be used both by IT organizations and vendors. By getting input from multiple partners, the benchmark is designed to deliver a vendor agnostic comparison," said Russ Fellows, Senior Analyst and Principal Developer of the VDI-IOmark at Evaluator Group. "We have also found the benchmarks have been insightful for IT administrators and vendors in developing VDI configuration and and best practices."

With the release of VDI-IOmark, Evaluator Group is delivering a VDI storage performance tool that tests from small to large-scale VDI deployments using 1/10th the server resources. Testing can be done in days rather than weeks, enabling, companies to quickly and accurately measure storage system performance running VDI user workloads.

"We have observed that VDI-IOmark not only delivers realistic VDI workloads, but is able to do so using far less server hardware than alternative VDI workload tools." said Ravi Chalaka, Vice President of Product & Solutions Marketing, BlueArc. Ravi continued, "With this tool, we envision the ability to provide realistic storage sizing guidelines to share with VDI IT users."

By utilizing EGI developed tools and drivers to replay VDI I/O workloads, VDI-IOmark is able to recreate typical usage, including boot storms and steady state operations. The first release of VDI-IOmark coincides with the user profiles outlined in VDI best practices guides. I/O workloads that are replayed include:

• View booting (for provisioned and non-provisioned users)     
• View steady state operation (using a heavy user profile)     
• Support for two modes of VDI configuration, fully provisioned VDI configurations and storage system writable snapshots / writable clones

Benchmark criteria include maximum response times and a requirement for all storage to reside on the storage system under test. A detailed list and example reporting is available on the VDI-IOmark website. It is VDI-IOmark's intent to publish price performance benchmark data as becomes publicly available from vendors.

The benchmark is available via license to end users and vendors from the VDI-IOmark website. End User license may be obtained free of charge for 30 days for internal evaluation. Annual license fee with phone support starts at $2,500. All publicly released results require additional licensing and must be audited prior to publication by VDI-IOmark organization and Evaluator Group.