Benchmarking in virtual desktops for end-to-end performance traceability

There are proven benefits in terms of cost and convenience in delivering thin-client based virtual desktops, versus the use of traditional physical computers for end-user computing purposes. In this paper, we present novel extensions in terms of user interface and methodology to our previously developed VDBench benchmarking toolkit for virtual desktop environments that uses principles of slow-motion benchmarking. We focus on automation aspects of benchmarking, and describe how we extend the end-to-end performance traceability for different desktop applications such as Internet Explorer, Media Player and Excel Spreadsheets. Our approach prevents invasive modification of thin-client systems, and allows emulation of user behavior with realistic workloads. Our user interface design issues are aimed at managing workflows between the benchmarking client and server, for easy instrumentation and generation of comprehensive performance reports for complex environment setups. In a validation study, we deploy the enhanced VDBench toolkit in a real-world virtual desktop testbed that hosts applications that render 3D visualizations of disaster scenarios for scene understanding and situational awareness. Through the benchmarking results, we show how the toolkit provides user QoE assessments involving reliable video events display under different network health conditions and computation resource configurations.