IGEL successfully transitioned to a pure software company – It’s all about the Hardware!!

By Fredrik Brattstig @virtualbrat

6 December 2022
A few weeks ago, IGEL announced that they are leaving hardware manufacturing behind!
Read the Press Release here!
Switching focus to pure software allows IGEL to focus fully on providing the best Operating System for your EDGE endpoints for any cloud/on-prem desktop and app consumerization. This will also open up the field greatly for IGEL’s Independent Hardware Vendors (IHV). There are multiple brands in the market that already manufacture endpoints where IGEL OS is installed in the factory, allowing for an easy and stable customer experience going forward with IGEL OS as the OS of choice. Some of the IHVs offering endpoint devices with IGEL OS pre-installed include’ HP, LG, Lenovo, 10Zig, and NComputing. And quite a few other brands are already in the IGEL Ready program: ATrust, Elo, Cybernet, Extra Computer, Clearcube, Dakel, Enovate, Dynabook to name some, and more to come. You can read about them, their offerings in the IGEL Ready program, and their unique features at:
https://www.igel.com/ready/showcase-categories/endpoints/

Based on the IGEL transition to pure software, Virtualbrat.com has decided to create a testing routine so that you will know what to expect in turns of performance from the different IHVs’ selection of endpoints. We will visualize the outcome of the test bench runs to give you as an IGEL customer the possibility to pick and choose the right endpoint hardware fulfilling your use case.
Maybe you need an Endpoint that just can do basic tasks or you need some more power to allow multimedia delivery and accelerated graphics in high-resolution sessions? This is your one-stop archive to get a feel for picking the right endpoint when you need to buy new hardware.

The testing routine will cover a few steps simulating real-life user patterns, it is all automated as far as possible to make sure that all tests are equal and comparable between different hardware endpoints.
Here is how it will be executed:

  • Hardware is booted on a UD Pocket that automates the testing procedure
  • Display resolution will be set based on the hardware level:
    Laptops will run the test with the built-in monitor’s native screen resolution
    Taskworker type of devices will run the test on 1920×1080 resolution
    Midrange level (Like the IGEL UD3) will run on 2560×1440 resolution
    High-End devices will run the test on 3840×2160 resolution
  • The testing procedure automatically starts up a Citrix Workspace App connection and connects to a Citrix VDA with Windows 10 and a partitioned vGPU (Based on Nvidia RTX6000 GPU with 6GB framebuffer Q-profile)
  • A PowerShell script will automatically be run within the Windows 10 session, walking through a series of user patterns:
    • Video playback performance
    • Displaying 3D web content (car visualizer)
    • YouTube playback (switching between regular view and Fullscreen
    • Automatically log off the Citrix VDI Session
  • Launch a second session, connecting to a Citrix Session Host VDA running Windows Server 2022 (No vGPU)
  • Automatically start up a PowerShell script in the Session host 2022
    • Video playback performance
      • PDF scrolling in Microsoft EDGE
      • Zooming on an X-Ray (High-Res) image
      • Editing a PowerPoint deck (walk through 10 slides)
      • Presenting the PowerPoint deck (walk through 10 slides with different transitions)
      • Displaying 3D web content (car visualizer)
      • YouTube playback with Citrix Browser Content Redirection (which means that the YouTube playback is rendered on the client instead of on the server), switching between regular view, theatre view, and Fullscreen
      • Automatically log off the Citrix VDI Session

While running all the tests, we will be capturing session statistics reported by the Citrix Workspace App on the endpoint and finally present those in graphs giving a nice overview of how well the endpoint performed. The graphs will look something like this:

CPU Utilization and Frames Per Second reported by the Citrix Workspace App

We will start by grabbing data from Citrix sessions and going forward add other display protocols to the mix.
As all sessions are being recorded and presented on each endpoint’s hardware benchmark page, you can also see the real-time statistics captured by Remote Display Analyzer in the VDI session itself – Read more about RDA here!

You can always find the Hardware Benchmark Library on the virtualbrat.com main page in the left pane:

Hope this will help YOU to find the right endpoint for your IGEL OS use case!

Click here to reach the Hardware Benchmark Library!

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