Today, at TechEd Europe 2013 in Madrid Spain, Project Virtual Reality Check (Project VRC) announced the release of a new white paper about the relative impact of Microsoft Office on the performance of VDI based user environments.

Microsoft Office is the most used application suite in the corporate environment. The goal of this new white paper was to investigate and document the VDI performance impact of Microsoft Office 2013 in comparison to the previous two versions of Microsoft Office, 2007 and 2010.

The comparison of Office 2007 with Office 2010, showed only a 1% performance difference in favour of Office 2007. The comparison of Office 2007 and Office 2013 showed a significant performance decrease of over 20%. This leads to the conclusion that to maintain the same performance levels with the newest version of Microsoft Office, about 20% more infrastructure capacity may be needed.

Office 2013 also consistently uses more CPU and over 272% more memory than Office 2007. In comparison, Office 2010 only uses 26% more memory. Optimizations such as turning animations and hardware graphics acceleration off did not influence the performance in any way.

Another key finding published in the white paper is that running x64 versions of Windows and Office will have substantial impact on Storage IOPS and memory footprint in comparison to x86 versions.

Jeroen van de Kamp, CTO of Login Consultants: "Many organizations are considering upgrading to Office 2013. To help them to make the correct decisions in the upgrade process, we wanted to provide independent insight in the VDI performance impact of this new Microsoft Office version."

Ruben Spruijt, CTO of PQR: "The goal of project VRC is to provide objective test data that will benefit the VDI and Server-Based Computing industry and end-user organisations. We recognise that every production environment is different. We therefore highly recommend to test the performance impact of Office 2013 in your own environment, before deployment."

Project ‘Virtual Reality Check' (Project VRC) was started in 2009 by SBC and VDI specialists PQR (www.pqr.com) and Login Consultants (www.loginconsultants.com) and focuses on independent research in the desktop virtualization market. Several white papers were published about the performance of different hypervisors, application virtualization solutions, Windows Operating Systems and antivirus solutions.

All Project VRC tests are performed with Login VSI (www.loginvsi.com). This vendor independent tool simulates realistic user workloads to objectively test the performance and scalability of VDI and Server Based Computing environments. The full test methodology used is described in the white paper.

This and all other Project VRC white papers can be downloaded for free at www.projectvrc.com.