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Not all VDI Clients were up to the PC Challenge
Not all VDI Clients were up to the PC Challenge
Mike Fodor, VP Product Management
In July Pano Logic conducted a hands-on end-user comparison of the user experience for a range of VDI clients to PCs at the BriForum event in Chicago. The results clearly show that Pano Zero Clients deliver a user experience significantly superior to both the Wyse P20 and the Wyse Xenith, confirming test results reported earlier in the User Experience Performance Testing Competitive Analysis by the Sarrel Group. We're very excited about these results as they show that user experience on true zero clients like the Pano G2 is close enough to PCs to eliminate any barrier to widespread adoption of VDI.
What did we learn?
Over the course of the BriForum event, we collected over 100 samples from attendees. The new G2 Pano Zero Clients placed first overall as well as best in PowerPoint, Excel and Video Playback. And looking at the cumulative totals shows that 2 out of 3 participants preferred the Pano over the other Wyse thin clients.
Most encouraging of all, was that most participants indicated that they were able to perceive differences between the Pano and the PC only when placed side-by-side. And most people indicated that in a real world VDI deployment users would be very satisfied with the user experience of their Pano Zero Client.
The detailed results of the tests are summarized in the table below:
How did we test?
At the BriForum event we setup a test environment that allowed attendees to perform blinded side-by-side comparisons of three different VDI clients against a current business-class PC.
For each test, the participant interacted with two systems: system “A” which was an unidentified VDI client and system “B” which was the reference PC. In total, there were three test stations, each comprising a VDI client and an identical reference PC as shown in the diagram to the right. The identities of all systems were completely hidden to prevent bias, appearing to the participants as just two sets of screens and keyboards at each test station.
During the test, the participant interacted directly with each system and completed four test cases: (1) PowerPoint editing and playback, (2) Excel editing and navigation, (3) scrolling through a complex Adobe PDF document and (4) video playback of 1080p and 720p videos using Windows Media Player. Each participant scored each system (A and B) on a scale of 1-5 (5 being the best) on a written form.
What did we test?
In all tests, traditional PCs were used as the reference platform. All PCs were identical recently purchased Dell Vostro 260s Slim Tower PCs configured with an Intel Core i3-2000 processor, 2GB RAM, Intel HD graphics and Windows 7 Professional. All applications were installed and run locally.
The VDI clients shared a common infrastructure:
- Server Hardware: Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX200, dual Intel Xeon Processor X5660, 24GB RAM, 4x146GB 15krpm SAS HDD configured as RAID 5 with 256MB RAM controller, 1Gbps network
- Virtualization Infrastructure: VMware ESX 4.1 Update 1, VMware vCenter Server 4.1 Update 1
- Desktop Virtual Machines: Windows 7 Professional, dual vCPUs, 2GB vRAM, 25GB vHDD
The virtual desktop infrastructure was configured to run on the same common infrastructure described above, and used the latest versions of Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View available at the time of testing:
- Citrix XenDesktop 5 Service Pack 1 running on VMware ESX
- VMware View 4.6
The VDI clients were installed and run in their out-of-the-box configurations, without any special tuning or tweaks. Our belief is that updating, tuning or optimizing zero clients is contrary to their primary value, and that customers should rightfully expect zero clients to simply work well out-of-the-box.
We selected the Wyse Xenith because we believe it is Wyse’s primary client designed for Citrix XenDesktop and it had a price comparable to the Pano's - the just released Wyse Xenith Pro didn't meet either of these requirements. We also selected the Wyse P20 because we believe it is Wyse’s primary PC-over-IP client designed for VMware View. Both clients used their native display protocols, Citrix HDX and PCoIP respectively, and had connections brokered through CItrix XenDesktop or VMware View respectively.
In contrast to the Wyse clients which are restricted to one virtual desktop infrastructure or the other, the Pano G2 zero client supports both Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View. For the purposes of these comparisons, we configured the Pano Zero Clients to connect to the virtual desktops using Pano System 4.5.1 running on ESX.