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Windows 10 – 1909 performance results and a look ahead at 2004

March 23, 2020

Is it just me or does Windows 10 2004 just not feel right as a name?

Regardless of my opinion on that, Microsoft will release this 20H1 build in April of this year. But most organizations today are not going to implement this new version right away. Market research by VDI Like a Pro shows that most enterprises today are running Windows 10 1803, or 1809.

The chart below shows data from the first half of 2019, peeking at the data we’re currently receiving for the 2020 state of EUC survey I expect Windows 10 1903 and 1909 usage in EUC to be around 20%.

Login VSI - Blog - Windows 10 1909 - Image 1 - What Operating Systems Are Used For Destop VMs?

 Source VDI Like a Pro – State of EUC 2019

Last December we’ve reviewed the 1909 release of Windows 10. When Microsoft began the formal process of rolling out this version: The November 2019 Update. For many business and enterprise customers, the pace of Windows as a Service (WaaS) with semi-annual releases over the last four years has been a challenge to manage, every update to Windows 10 has continued to deliver key enhancements with a lot of focus on security and device management, however, performance and compatibility of applications are not guaranteed. As this is a servicing release, we should expect an increase in performance, especially around features like CPU rotation.

When a CPU is manufactured, not all cores are created equal. Some of the cores may have slightly different voltage and power characteristics that could allow them to get a “boost” in performance. We call these: “favored cores” as they can offer better performance than the other cores on the same die.

Login VSI - Blog - Windows 10 1909 - Image 2 - Number of Services

 Source: Login VSI webinar Windows 10 1909, December 2019

Even before I start doing my performance tests, I make an initial judgment on what I think is going to happen. As a rule of thumb, we know that typically a new release has more features and both scalability and application performance go down a little bit. But why is this? One of the easy things to spot is the number of services that are built into Windows 10. Most of these services perform background activities that on a physical device make a lot of sense, but in a virtual world not so much. E.g. the Bluetooth and WLAN services. We can see that going from 1903 the number of series has remained stable, and the number of running services out of the box has decreased a tiny bit.

Login VSI - Blog - Windows 10 1909 - Image 3 - Task Manager

 Source: Login VSI webinar Windows 10 1909, December 2019

One of the major issues uncovered in previous tests is the fact that the Microsoft OneDrive client is more than happy to consume most of the CPU resources you have available. But there is good news Microsoft has released a OneDrive machine-based client that from a performance perspective works well. We’ve therefore decided to include this in our tests by default and advise you to do the same.

Login VSI - Blog - Windows 10 1909 - Image 4 - Performance Results Windows 10 - 1909

 Source: Login VSI webinar Windows 10 1909, December 2019

If we take a look at my Cisco HyperFlex test-lab we can see that after performance tuning (typically with VMware OSOT or Citrix Optimizer) I can run about 290 users on my hosts. If we continue to update this number falls to 228 users for Windows 10 1903 but then comes back to 245 users by Windows 10 1909. If we look at the baseline (a measure of performance when there’s no stress on the system) we can see that over time Microsoft has made every action you take a bit slower, these problems you’ll even notice when there’s just a few users on the system so its important to optimize. Typical areas to look for problems are Anti-Virus, Improper storage configurations or many background services running.

Login VSI - Blog - Windows 10 1909 - Image 5 - Performance Results Windows 10 - 1909 - Scattergraph

 Source: Login VSI webinar Windows 10 1909, December 2019

By default, our products also capture logon times for each user we simulate. Its interesting to see that with every release of Windows 10 logon times are impacted. If you have service level agreements on these metrics you might need to revise them before going live. During these tests I’ve also used Helge Klein’s Uberagent to capture additional metrics on process performance. Its an ideal combination to combine load-testing with more traditional types of monitoring to quickly analyze where delays in your system are coming from.

Login VSI - Blog - Windows 10 1909 - Image 6 - App Readiness

 Source: Login VSI webinar Windows 10 1909, December 2019

If you’d like to know more about these tests feel free to contact us, or if you’d like to try for yourself, request a demo of our software today and start maximizing your end user experience.

 

 


 

 

Windows 10

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