Comparative Analysis of Virtual Desktops in Cloud : Performance of VMware Horizon View and OpenStack VDI

Sammanfattning: Context. With the evolvement of cloud computing in recent years many companies have stated providing various services using it. Desktop as a Service, DaaS is one of services in the cloud computing in which the backend of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, VDI is hosted by a cloud service provider. Although in SaaS, Software as a Service Web applications are used, all kinds of applications can be used in DaaS. There are many companies which provide VDI for private cloud and they are VMware Horizon, XenDesktops by Citrix, OpenStack VDI solution and etc. Objectives. In this thesis two VDI solutions are analyzed based on the virtual desktop launch time and the performance of the desktop in various test cases. The VDI solutions considered are VMware Horizon view and OpenStack VDI. Methods. The method for this research consists of two stages. The first stage was a qualitative analysis in which literature study and a survey was conducted. In the next stage, experiment was setup where different performance metrics were calculated when the virtual desktop was put under several test cases. Results. Results collected include the virtual desktops launch time in two scenarios and several performance metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, average IO size, average latency, throughput, IOPS and queue length at the processor. Conclusions. Performance of Virtual desktop running on OpenStack VDI was better in most of the test cases. In the test scenario where disk was put under stress OpenStack VDI solution performance was better than VMware Horizon View. Even considering the launch time for virtual desktops, OpenStack VDI performed better compared to VMware Horizon View.