Virtualization has enabled organizations to cut down their IT infrastructure costs and addressed / increased major security concerns. However, when virtualization is planned by infrastructure teams, one aspect of user experience is commonly ignored: Performance

The challenges in performance testing of such environments however are many. Unlike application performance testing where workload planning and conducting performance tests is relatively easy, performance testing of virtual environments involves complex workload selection and very high degree of accuracy in results. This paper discusses an approach to plan and conduct performance testing of virtual desktop environments, so that while the organization makes more efficient use of its IT hardware, user experience is not compromised. This paper also describes performance test planning, workload selection, tool use and result analysis is discussed. In addition, a methodology has been developed to calculate the tool induced error in the results. A case study is included that compares real desktop usage with virtual environment usage for a given client model and how it helped an organization to plan thevVirtualization strategy.

Ajay Walgude is a Senior Manager and Global head of Testing solutions and Business Development of Financial Services SBU of Capgemini. He is responsible for Industrialization of Testing Innovations, Business Development
support, accelerating technology competency and providing thought leadership leveraging the testing CoE. Ajay joined Capgemini in 2004 and has been directly involved in providing testing services for a second largest investment bank in US. He successfully transitioned this small testing engagement to very large managed services engagement driving the delivery of testing complex systems and applications. Before joining Capgemini Ajay worked for SNS Technologies and Neilsoft where he managed delivery for multiple key client accounts. AJay’s first stint in the industry was with Thermax B & W ltd back in 1994, initially as the Design engineer of water tube boiler then as a managing a team of software developers and testers for CAD & custom engineering applications. AJay has received his Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering from IST, Pune, after his Diploma in Mechanical Engineer from Government Polytechnic Pune.

Ashish Tyagi is a performance test lead and works in Capgemini as a Performance testing solutions provider. He has handled and led more than 50 performance testing engagements and has done intensive work in performance testing of web, client server, Citrix, Sybase and Flex applications. He also specializes in providing performance engineering services to clients using profiling tools. He has earlier written white paper on Web 2.0 performance testing.
He has done his Bachelor of Technology from HBTI Kanpur in Electronics engineering. He is a certified Accredited Integration Specialist on LoadRunner from HP and Performance Testing Solution designer from IBM.