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 () and Login Consultants () 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 . 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.