Impacts of Application Usage and Local Hardware on the Throughput of Computer Networks with Desktop Virtualization

Abstract

Currently, virtualization solutions are employed in the vast majority of organizations around the world. The reasons for this are the benefits gained by the approach, focusing on increases in security, availability and data integrity. These privileges are also present in a new technique, which emerges from this same concept and is called desktop virtualization. This method, compelled by these advantages, has grown considerably and is likely to be implemented on more than three-quarters of organizations before 2014. As it is a technique based on physical client server architecture, it conducts all its actions on a local computer and responds to user interaction, through clients that are physically elsewhere. This means that the technique depends on the communication network which makes the interaction possible. Therefore, the importance of the network is increased and it is important to study its behavior compared to a traditional desktop solution, that is, a local solution. This article demonstrates the impact related to a Quality of Service (QoS) parameter, throughput, which suffered great alterations depending on the implemented computational environment. Concomitantly, other results are expressed concerning the Quality of Experience (QoE) decay with a thin client and a significant benefit of virtualization on the QoS, when remote access is required.