On Tuesday I posted about VDI and WAAS, as part of an ongoing discussion on WAN optimisation for VDI.

Today I finally got some deeper detail from Cisco about VDI and WAAS, shout out to Brad for putting me onto it.

The document is the "Cisco Application Networking Services for VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Deployment Guide" and it is well worth your time to have a flick through.

If you are looking at putting in WAN acceleration for VDI/RDP then you should read through this document, no matter what vendor you are looking at, to give you some good detail.

For example it details traffic flows, configuration details and performance results.



One of the interesting results is the response time. Remember as discussed its the response time that is critical in VDI/RDP over a WAN, rather than the bandwidth. In a test over a 1.5Mbps line with a 100ms RTT, the results were:

The response time measured at the remote branch office during a test of 15 simultaneous VMware VDI sessions shows a 4-times improvement. Cisco WAAS acceleration results in an average response time of 154 ms, and native VMware VDI achieves an average response time of 601 ms (Figure 18).

If our metric for user experience is under 200ms this shows that without WAAS we have a problem, with WAAS we have success.

Go have a read for yourself, its worth the time.

Rodos