A Systematic Quality Analysis of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Technologies

摘要

The Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is a promising technology hosted by powerful servers or within the cloud that allows remote and potentially weak devices to run their virtualized desktop environment on a powerful machine. Mainly used in commercial environments, i.e. enterprises, also private users might be interested in this functionality. The benefits are given through customizable (virtual) hardware resources on the fly while maintaining a long lasting desktop environment. Hardware failures, resource limitations and risks due to damages to the physical hardware are omitted with desktops running upon a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Currently, many Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solutions are available, most important of which are XenDesktop by Citrix, Horizon View by VMware, and VDI by Microsoft. In this article, we deploy and systematically evaluate the quality of these solutions in terms of streaming quality under the workload of popular application types and under the influence of various network conditions. We conclude that XenDesktop by Citrix is performing best, Horizon View by VMware is close, but provides less features, while VDI by Microsoft is both limited in its quality and its functionality.