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Submitted Michel Roth
Quest just launched a new free tool on the vWorkspace Community called the vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer. It is important to note that this tool not only works for Quest vWorkspace but also works for other desktop virtualization product like Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View or other.
Tests have shown that the impact of the vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer can be quite big.
VDI performance - vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer
As you can see the big savings are in the area of storage. Because of the optimizations applied to an idle (so no user logged on) Windows 7 Enterprise VM by the Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer the read and write IOPS were reduced by more than 90%. This has a huge effect on the scalability of VDI environments since (lack of) IOPS is currently the most common bottleneck in VDI deployments.
There are also disk space savings. We deployed two virtual desktops via the Quest vWorkspace rapid provisioning options (Differencing Disks / Linked Clones) and then we compared the vanilla Windows 7 virtual desktop to the virtual desktop optimized with the Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer. The virtual desktop optimized with the Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer consumed 43% less disk space.
In addition, the Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer also introduced RAM savings of up to 10%. Some people have seen more savings, up to 200 MB per virtual desktop but this depends heavily on the characteristics of the virtual desktop. Finally, a virtual desktop optimized by Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer also consumed up to 37% less CPU although it has to be stated that this was measured on (as stated earlier) a desktop with no users logged on so even though the relative savings are high, the absolute savings are not that dramatic.
The vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer is a collection of 40 optimizations to Windows to make them more ‘VDI friendly’. VDI friendly in this case primarily means that it will consume less system resources and thus improve the resulting scalability of the VDI environments. The vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer provides the capability to filter optimizations based on ‘impact’ allowing you only to apply those optimizations. It also allows you to filter by category so you can see to which area the optimizations apply with the categories being Storage, CPU&Memory and User Experience.
Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer
Next to the main UI the vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer also accepts command line switches. One switch, the –edit switch, allows you to open up to UI so you can change the description and justification fields using the editor. The other switch is the –run switch. This will allow you to run the vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer from the command line so you can use the vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer in scripts.
The final feature I would like to put out is the ‘Export’ function. This allows you to export your current vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer configuration to an formatted XML file for easy use in your documentation efforts.
Quest vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer - Export
If it wasn’t clear, the vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer is completely free, directly available from the vWorkspace Community. All feedback is welcome as next version of the vWorkspace Desktop Optimizer will be built based on suggestions from the community.
