I was reading another article about cloud computing today. Almost all articles and posts seem to focus on how easy it is to add resources to your environment when you need more power.

Before you start to explain to me why this is true, yes, I do agree. It is very easy to add resources to an existing environment. When you use vSphere, Hyper-V or XenServer just add another host to your cluster or datacenter and you have more power that can be used by your machines. You can give virtual machines more CPU power and/or memory, etc. In the end your applications (that’s in the end what’s most important) have more chance for time to run on a shared environment.

My problem with this approach is simple: Aren’t we doing things the wrong way around?

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As you may have read we are busy implementing a VMware View environment and have encountered numerous chalenges already.

Most of them have been solved by hard and innovative work or the upgrade from VMware View 3.0.1 to 3.1. Especially the upgrade to VMware View 3.1 resulted in a very good user- and administrator experience.

Unfortunately we kept having performance problems using various desktops (Windows XP or Vista). Scrolling through the Helpdesk tool and browsing web pages with moving graphics like Flash was very shaky even to the extend that desktop sessions froze when to much graphical information had to be processed. This was very strange because at another customer site VMware View worked like a charm with identical sizing but different clients (Wise vs Desktop PC).

A colleague, Anthony Winters, spend a lot of time analyzing these problems. The first thing he found out that performance was poor on the desktop but great on his laptop. He quickly eliminated all variables (network, switches, cabling) until he knew for sure the client was the problem.

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After making a P2V of a couple of physical Citrix servers at a client, Anne Jan and I did some tuning for the best performance. Since the servers were on old hardware they now are already faster, but we wanted to get the most out of it. We first removed hardware drivers like Anne Jan’s article mentioned earlier. (more…)

On Gabes Virtual World I read an article with the title ‘Unbelievable Hyper-V performance ‘. At first I was a bit shocked by the title. Hyper-V good performance? That the complete opposite to my own experience with Microsofts virtualization attempt. But luckily what Gabe ment was ‘Unbelievable BAD Hyper-V performance ‘.

You can read the complete article here.

Conclusion
A max score of 1,875 VMs per core where VMware ESX on the same hardware does 3,5 VMs per core. Maybe the test is not 100% accurate but with these scores maybe someone should step up and do a real hypervisor performance comparison (same hardware, load, etc).