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Presentation Server and 2003 Terminal Services Performance Evaluation

Saturday, 22 September 2007 by Michel Roth

Today the Tolly Group presented a whitepaper that reports on a performance evaluation of Citrix Presentation Server (Platinum Edition) and Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services. I think this paper goes to show that there's a real art in how you present certain results.

This is the management summary that the Tolly group provided as a result of the tests performed:
• Nearly three times faster application performance
• Up to four times faster printing
• Up to 73% lower bandwidth consumption.

Especially the first bullet puzzled me, "Faster application performance". As it turns out this is the time it takes to launch an application, edit a file and such. They tested it against multiple network types and it was much faster on CPS then on plain TS. What's the deal here? SpeedScreen. It's the same deal at bullet three. Bullet two is of course Universal printing. So in theory, 66% of this whitepaper is about Speedscreen, which they already did a whitepaper on.

This goes to show that SpeedScreen is a very important and very much underestimated feature in Presentation Server. Many of the other products that do SBC are quite mature but almost every single competitor lacks something like SpeedScreen. This is why I think Provision is making a great move in developing their own "SpeedScreen for RDP". SpeedScreen is a technology that was valuable in the past, very valuable in the current market and will continue to grow with VDI becoming a commodity. If you want to know more about SpeedScreen, you should check out the awesome tech video Brian Madden did for Citrix on SpeedScreen.

Anyway, read the Tolly whitepaper that started me on this rant here. I wonder by the way, if this Tolly whitepaper didn't have anything to do with the RTO whitepaper that concluded that adding Citrix to a Terminal Server decreases the user capacity and lengthens login times ....