TechAgility

***UPDATE***

Please check the comments below – but it appears I’m incorrect on the statement regarding Teradici PCoIP needing a PCI card, there is a SW/SW version in development and I’d be guessing this might be coming out sometime around VMworld as Beta? Just a guess on my part?

So just as we headed in to the weekend I noted Brian Madden’s post – Microsoft’s RDP host-side rendering (Calista) plans include optional GPU offload hardware & custom chips. (Oh, and Hyper-V is required!) as well as Alessandro’s post Is Microsoft silently building a better VDI? and realised that this also tied in with some recent articles earlier in the week from the MSDN side of things around the new Remote Desktop Services (RDS now effectively replaces the old Terminal Services) on Windows 2008, namely getting Aero Glass Remoting in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Running WS08 Terminal Server as a virtualized guest under Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

So now this started getting me thinking, there is an almost unbelievable amount of hype right now about VDI, where it’s getting to the point that as soon as we hear about either a Customer or a Partner telling us that they have installed a PoC/Pilot or deployed VDI we can almost guarantee the next thing they will be wanting to know is “how do I get decent Video/MultiMedia/USB performance, it’s not working correctly, and I want it fixed”.

Ideally what should happen when designing a Desktop Virtualization Strategy (in my opinion) is start with the Success Criteria that the design needs to meet as defined by the business units/stakeholders/users, and if they are unsure or don’t know, then the best way to think about this is to strive to provide a User Experience that is *indistinguishable* from a normal PC.

Which is why the first part of designing the solution should be deciding on the Remote Protocol that is needed to meet the Success Criteria?

• If you only need to supply standard Office Apps then RDP will likely be fine
• If it’s Office Apps plus some Video with some USB devices then you may find that you can get away with RDP plus one of the RDP enhancements like TCX, etc.
• If it’s Office Apps plus some Video with some USB devices and you need to make this work over something less than a 10Mb LAN with a possibility of anything greater than 150 – 200ms latency then you may want to seriously consider ICA as the only viable choice.
• Now if you have demanding users that require a true PC like experience regardless of how it’s done then there are a number of choices like RGS (from HP), PCoIP (from Teradici), SPICE (from Redhat?), etc. however as you start to examine the pro’s and con’s of each one you may find that each one of these may bring further limitations to yuor design?
  • The key takeaway from this is that you can have either a good 
    user experience *OR* low bandwidth – not neccessarily BOTH?

Desktop Virtualization today:

So my opinion is that currently there are two front runners out there today marketing, selling and deploying Virtual Desktop Solutions:

• Citrix XenDesktop
• VMware View

I know there are others of note, but generally these are the two main leaders today who are spending the most in Marketing trying to own the top spot in this area, and who both not only have a Solution and a Broker but also a Hypervisor that provides the grunt at the back end. However to a certain extent both of these solutions are fundamentally flawed in that neither of them *currently* have (or support) a Remote Protocol that delivers what I would refer to as a High Quality User Experience that is available today.

Side note on “High Quality User Experience”:

So far most of what I have seen in the field is examples of “Desktop Virtualization” that have been designed by IT for IT – not for the business or users. In some instances it has come as quite a shock to those designing the Solution that one or all of the various Stakeholders, Business or Users not only want the ability to view Training Video’s, but actually have the audacity to demand it as a Criteria of Success for the project? And USB redirection for their Blackberries too!

Bottom line, if your planned Desktop Virtualization solution does not include MultiMedia and USB as a measure of success then there is a good chance it’s fundamentally doomed? At the very least include some scope for a Phase 2 that will expand the project to include this and plan for it up front?

Yes VMware has announced a partnership with Teradici to develop PCoIP for VDI instances of View, (VMware does support HP’s RGS in View, but only to BladePC’s and BladeWS’s) but this appears that it will be based on a H/W PCIe card that will be capable of supporting 32 and 64 VDI instances from the hosted end, so there are some limitations like having to use Servers that can support PCIe cards, but the real kicker is that these cards won’t be available until mid-next year?

Yes Citrix has HDX, (re-Marketed term covering the ICA Protocol ) and although they have now started releasing the HDX-Flash add-on there is still no sight of the HDX-3D? For the life of me I can’t understand what is holding up Citrix on this, if it is really as good as it’s supposed to be then they should be releasing it now while they can beat VMware to the punch.

How to create a portable ver. of RDP7:

So with this in mind I looked a bit deeper at the RDP7 side of things to see what differences there were? First thing I noticed was that it’s still referred to as Ver. 6.1.7100.0 (this is Ver. 7, right?), and after some quick googling the next thing I came across is that it is relatively simple to take a copy of the MSTSC.EXE and save it to a folder on another machine and run this version (you will also need a copy of MSTSCAX.DLL and a folder beneath this named “en-US” and in this you’ll need a copy of MSTSC.EXE.MUI and MSTSCAX.DLL.MUI)

Once you have this accomplished you’ll be free to run the RDP7 Client to connect to either your Windows 7 or Server 2008 Host and see what differences there are. Essentially all of the differences are covered under the post:Aero Glass Remoting in Windows Server 2008 R2 but I must admit I was quite surprised at how well it was able to cope with a DiVX avi of Kung Fu Panda, the picture was really sharp and defined, the audio appeared to stay in synch and it didn’t appear to consume much more than 4 – 500Kb/s. When it came to Flash this again had good definition and sharpness – but there was lot’s of gaps in the playback – so on Flash it still scores a miss?

Putting this in context, here are some very rudimentary tests:

**NOTE** I did not test the Aero feature

Bandwidth was simply measured by using “Bandwidth Monitor” from www.bwmonitor.com
This also had the effect of causing 20 – 25Kb/s consumption just in the act of being displayed in the remote screen, so typically it was hidden until needed.

Conclusions:

• RDP7 is definitely an improvement – and provides a much clearer and cleaner display
  • Gone are the old days of RDP presenting the screen with 6 or 7 horizontal bars from left to right and top to bottom
  • It does appear able to deliver quite reasonable Video today
  • It does not appear to have delivered much or any improvements in Flash

written by dcaddick