XenApp on ESX or XenServer

There has been a lot of talk about Project VRC:

Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) is a joint venture of Log•in Consultants and PQR, who have researched the optimal configuration for the different available hypervisors (hardware virtualization layers). The project arises from the growing demand for a founded advice on how to virtualise Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop (VDI) workloads. Through a number of researches, Log•in Consultants and PQR show you the scaling possibilities for Terminal Server environments as well as Virtual Desktops.

Most of the talk about VRC was of course on the results. (You need to login to be able to download the pdf’s.) In short: VMware ESX beats Citrix Xenserver on VDI deployments and Citrix Xenserver beats VMware ESX on XenApp deployments. I’ve heard a lot of people argue about the fact if the used test methodology was correct and if the used optimization for ESX was necessary or not. (Mem.ShareScanGhz and Mem.AllocHighThreshold, unnecessary in my opinion.) But VRC will start testing again without the “optimization” to see if these effected the results or not.

A week after the VRC published there findings Team VROOM, VMware’s Performance Team, also published a blog article on XenApp performance. They also used ESX 3.5 and Xenserver 5. But the results they harvested from their test had a different conclusion. Of course their test methodology and tools were different from Project VRC’s so it’s hard, and in my opinion impossible, to compare them. I guess both test show that you CAN virtualize a XenApp environment with little extra overhead, that’s the most important thing to remember.

Please visit both VROOM and Project VRC and start reading these excellent articles. Both have put a lot of time in testing and writing and definitely deserve your full attention, and feedback/comments!