Benchmarking VDI Performance and DEX With Dr. Benny Tritsch
When it comes to virtual desktops, there’s one truth that can’t be ignored: if the user experience isn’t great, nothing else matters. Employees don’t care how sophisticated your infrastructure is; they just want their desktop to feel fast, smooth, and reliable.
If you’ve ever tried to balance performance, cost, and scalability in a virtual desktop environment, you know it’s easier said than done. That’s why independent experts like Dr. Benny Tritsch are so valuable. With decades of experience analyzing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and End User Computing (EUC), Dr. Tritsch has become an expert at uncovering what makes or breaks Digital Employee Experience (DEX).
The best part about Dr. Benny’s approach, which he shared in our on-demand webinar, is that it isn’t about theory. It’s about benchmarking, simulating real-world workloads, and translating hard data into actionable insights.
Windows Desktop Spectrum
The modern Windows desktop isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution but a spectrum. Regardless of whether you use On-premises desktops and RDSH setups on a LAN, Hybrid and hosted VDI environments, or fully cloud-native offerings like Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Windows 365, each option comes with trade-offs. And the closer you get to the cloud, the more you’ll run into one unavoidable reality: latency.
Hosting Windows in the Cloud
Cloud desktops offer unmatched flexibility, but with that comes latency during login, app launches, and screen refreshes. While it can’t be eliminated, it can be controlled.
Latency is why vendors like Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix continually refine their remote access protocols. They want to smooth out the rough edges so end users don’t notice the hiccups. The truth is, you can’t beat physics, but you can benchmark how different protocols handle the pressure.
EUC vs. DEX: Why the Distinction Matters
In this masterclass, Dr. Tritsch cuts through the noise around EUC and DEX metrics. He explains the traditional focus on CPU, memory, and uptime, and why teams should also weigh factors that reflect the user’s experience, like lag, video quality, and screen responsiveness. As Benny puts it,
“You can only optimize what you can measure.”
His framework, DEX4DaaS, makes these soft metrics visible and measurable.
If you’re only tracking admin metrics, you’re missing half the story.
What Quality Means in VDI
According to Dr. Tritsch, VDI quality is multi-dimensional. It’s about dozens of factors working together:
- Boot and login times
- App and content load speed
- User input delay (the hidden killer)
- Graphics APIs and media format support
- Screen refresh rate
- Endpoint specs and stability
- Session consistency and resilience
What determines VDI priorities is the persona using them. Each persona requires a different level of compute, graphics, and network performance. A CAD designer wants a smooth 3D rendering, while a task worker doesn’t need the VM and network specs required for CAD or CAM design and can function with something less robust without feeling frustrated.
Dr. Tritsch suggests mapping your quality metrics to end-user personas. He shared his persona chart in the masterclass, so you can pinpoint the most important aspects of VDI for the persona you are working with and match them with the appropriate VM type.
Simulating Workloads: The Power of SimLoads
Once you know your user persona and what they need to work without friction, the next step is fair benchmarking. Dr. Tritsch turns to repeatable simulations using SimLoads, a framework that models real-world usage.
Through the EUC Score platform, you can spin up anything from a basic test lab to a complex workload. The platform also captures telemetry data, user activities, and screen recordings. The result is visual analytics that make performance differences easy to see.
Dr. Tritsch’s independent benchmarks reveal where EUC metrics fall short of DEX reality and show organizations how to close the gap. In this masterclass, learn why benchmarking isn’t optional, but the key to truly understanding user experience.
