Resources and bandwidth required for desktop virtualization solutions

A comparison has been made between PCoIP (Horizon 6), ICA, RDP 8 protocols in the official proposal published by VMware with the following conditions:

Windows session from Windows 2012R2 for 60 users
8 CPU cores are assigned to the mentioned operating system
Users are using the system with office user and the system is under load
Each user has an average of 3.5 running programs that he switches between them consecutively
Each user’s session is set to 1152*864 resolution with 32-bit color depth
ICA protocol is set to the lowest image compression mode

With the above conditions, the test results are as follows:

Bandwidth consumption chart (for every 60 users):

Average consumption per user in this account:

Each PCoIP user averages 44.7 Kbps
Each user of ICA (with minimal compression – that it can be optimized) averages 48.4 Kbps
Each RDP 8 user averages 50.7 Kbps

According to this proposal, one CPU can be assigned to every 8 users for office use (we consider double the number of CPU cores that have hyperthreading)

According to this proposal, we allocate 1 GB of RAM for each office user.

Note 1: These values are only the claims of VMware and according to our experience, these values change with the following conditions:

Server hardware (BRAND, RAM, CPU, STORAGE)
network infrastructure
Operating system version
Account Type

And in fact, the numbers we get in our labs and projects are different from these values and are more in the case of PCOIP and RDP 8.

Note 2: This proposal is old and all these protocols are in their new versions, namely HORIZON7, HDX, RDP 8.1 (REMOTE FX)A
, DDP* work much more optimally, based on our experience

in server resource consumption

Rank 1: DDP

Rank 2: HDX

Rank 3: PCoIP

Rank 4: RDP 8.1

in the consumption of network bandwidth

Rank 1: HDX

Rank 2: DDP

Rank 3: PCoIP

Rank 4: RDP 8.1

in simplified implementation

Rank 1: DDP

Rank 2: RDP 8.1

Rank 3: PCoIP

Rank 4: HDX

Note: These values are directly dependent on the following two factors:
Account Type
Coefficient of user concurrency

DDP Protocol

The optimized DDP protocol is Microsoft’s RDP protocol, which is modeled after the H.264 image standard, so that:
The differential image is produced by the server (that is, only the difference of two frames is produced – it adds much less load to the server)
Images are compressed by a special algorithm. More than 80% less bandwidth consumption compared to RDP
Compressed packets are encrypted by a special algorithm.

The resources required for this protocol are calculated for both office and professional users and are as follows:

Office user

Each user 1.5GB of RAM
One CPU core for every 2.5 users (we consider double the number of CPU cores that have hyperthreading)

Professional user

Each user 2GB of RAM
One CPU core for every 2.5 users (we consider double the number of CPU cores that have hyperthreading)

Keep in mind to reserve 2GB of RAM for the host itself, for example, consider an i7 CPU and 24GB of RAM for 20 office users.
The above resources are considered for the image resolution of 1366*768, which is a suitable resolution for monitors up to 20 inches in size, and a higher value requires more resources and lower resolution values require fewer resources.
The above example is intended for optimal user experience and many customers use the above resources for even 30 office users.
The type of operating system is also effective in the amount of resources – in terms of optimal use of resources, we rank operating systems as follows:

Server 2012 R2
Win 8.1
Win 7
Win 10
Ram bass is very effective in system performance. (DDR4 RAM should be used as much as possible)
For the number of users more than 5 people, SSD must be used for the operating system and programs. (SSD read and write speed is very effective in system performance – the optimal speed is about 500MB for reading and writing – for more than 30 users, you must use SSD plus RAID0)

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