In this whitepaper contains new tests, comparing TS workloads on VMware vSphere 4.0, Citrix XenServer 5.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V R2:The main updated findings of “Project VRC Phase II version 2.0” whitepaper are: • Considerable vSphere performance increase with VMware vSphere patch• Update on best practices and recommended configuration• Investigated: performance impact ASLR

This Project VRC phase 2 whitepaper focuses completely on analyzing Terminal Services (TS) workloads running  on the latest generation hardware and hypervisors. While in phase 1 of project VRC VMware ESX3.5, Citrix XenServer 5.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 were tested on a HP DL385G5 with AMD “Barcelona” processors, this whitepaper reviews vSphere 4.0, XenServer 5.5 and Hyper-V 2.0 running on HPDL380G6 with Intel “Nehalem” processor. Project VRC made a deliberate choice not to directly compare Hypervisors in phase 1 (and published results in separate whitepapers), the community and the vendors, logically, did. Therefore, we decided that Project VRC will release this single whitepaper for the phase 2 results, including the three hypervisors. 

This excel sheet contains an overview of the tests published in the Project VRC phase II whitepaper. 

This whitepaper is a review and reflection on previous Project VRC publications, the benchmark: “Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI)” and Windows clock behavior within virtual machines.  This discussion is fueled by the fact that results from the individual Project VRC whitepapers are set side-by-side to compare hypervisors. Project VRC has been in discussion with both vendors and community, and performed additional research in this context. Before Project VRC can publish new results, it is important to address any questions, review the impact of this discussion and improve VSI where possible.