VDI Like a Pro team announces VDI Performance survey results

For the second week in a row, we have news to share about one of the many community efforts in our space: This week it comes from VDI Like a Pro, run by Ruben Spruijt, Mark Plettenberg, and Christiaan Brinkhoff. (Last week, it was Tim Mangan’s MSIX Report Card.)

VDI Like a Pro is the team behind the annual State of the EUC Industry surveys. They are going to open the 2019 edition soon (and we’ll let you know when it happens), but for today, they have released the results of a shorter survey focused on VDI performance.

The survey was done in conjunction with the Login VSI VDI Performance Summit, which is taking place today in Amsterdam. Login VSI sponsors VDI Like a Pro (as do FSLogix and Frame). The results cover more than 200 respondents from almost 30 countries, though they do skew towards the Netherlands.

You can head over to the VDI Like a Pro blog to read more about it and see the full report, but here are a few results that stood out to me.

Like any conversation in desktop virtualization, one of the big topics is DaaS and cloud desktops. The majority of respondents are still in the “no” category for public cloud workloads, but it’s only a very slight majority, at 52.2%.

There are a lot of questions covering VDI performance issues and what people are doing about them, and I’ll let you read the results themselves to see the details. (Though for a preview, to not much surprise, bad apps figure highly.)

What I found interesting is that just because a workload is in the cloud doesn’t mean that it always performs well. VDI Like a Pro asked, “How is your DaaS/VDI cloud environment performance?” 62.7% of respondents did not have desktops in the cloud; but of the rest of the responses, only 10.8% said that their cloud desktops always perform. 10.8% said their desktops perform most of the time, and 5.4% said that their cloud desktop performance is fluctuating. In other words, most people with cloud desktops have some inconsistency in their performance.

On top of all this, we had to deal with the patches for Meltdown and Spectre in 2018, and most respondents have noticed a performance impact.

Overall, respondents are spending a lot of time on performance: For example, 40.7% are working on it 1-3 days per month; 16% are spending 3-6 days per month; and 8% are doing 6 to 10 days.

Clearly, the cloud doesn’t solve all of these issues, so we’re going to be talking about this for a long time—sounds like a good time for this survey and the VDI Performance Summit.

Thanks again to the folks at VDI Like a Pro for putting this together and giving me a sneak peek!