At the end of January VMware revealed that it was working to increase its virtual machines density up to 16 VMs per core, mostly for VDI environments. That is twice the average amount of VMs that customers seems able to accommodate today. Anyway there were no stats around at the time and Citrix took the bait and did some of their own assessments.
Citrix believes that it can accommodate into a single physical server up to 125 virtual desktops (and 500 hosted shared desktops and 5,000 local streamed desktops) with XenDesktop 4.0 and the Xeon 5500 CPUs. The specification of the server was:
- 72GB RAM
- 2 xC CPU Q/C Intel x5570
- XenServer 5.5
- XenDesktop 4.0
Citrix measured the density using the independent benchmark framework called Project Virtual Reality Check, which already raised a lot of attention exactly one year ago, when it was used to compare performance of VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V for Terminal Services and VDI workloads.
Class room environments are fantastic, but there was no mention of desktop configurations and/or applications that run the response times, latency etc etc.
Although a useful benchmark there is no substitution for VDI assessments and a solid PoC to ensure your environment scales for your business and users.