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 and Login Consultants 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, 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.