DeskBench: Flexible virtual desktop benchmarking toolkit

Abstract

The thin-client computing model has been recently regaining popularity in a new form known as the virtual desktop. That is where the desktop is hosted on a virtualized platform. Even though the interest in this computing paradigm is broad there are relatively few tools and methods for benchmarking virtual client infrastructures. We believe that developing such tools and approaches is crucial for the future success of virtual client deployments and also for objective evaluation of existing and new algorithms, communication protocols, and technologies. We present DeskBench, a virtual desktop benchmarking tool, that allows for fast and easy creation of benchmarks by simple recording of the user's activity. It also allows for replaying the recorded actions in a synchronized manner at maximum possible speeds without compromising the correctness of the replay. The proposed approach relies only on the basic primitives of mouse and keyboard events as well as screen region updates which are common in window manager systems. We have implemented a prototype of the system and also conducted a series of experiments measuring responsiveness of virtual machine based desktops under various load conditions and network latencies. The experiments illustrate the flexibility and accuracy of the proposed method and also give some interesting insights into the scalability of virtual machine based desktops.