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Aug 03
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So last week I managed to get RemoteFX up and running from a Windows 7 VDI from a Hyper-V Host – initially I was a little perturbed as it didn’t look that good, and appeared to have a certain amount of stutter to it, I then realised that I had at some point unplugged the ethernet cable from my Docking Station and as a result I was actually connecting via WiFi – once I replaced the ethernet cable all was fine and the experience was very good indeed.
It’s possibly worth noting here two immutable facts regarding Desktop Virtualization (in my opinion):
- You need to be able to provide a User Experience that is as good as, or better, than a PC today otherwise your project will definitely struggle and may even be doomed to failure before getting to the Pilot stage
- The User Experience cannot be simply defined or quantified – it is extremely subjective, and as such it is very much a “movable target” and subject to the whims of those being asked at any given time of day, etc… (my advice is to aim high
)
So while it was running on the WiFi I tried checking for any latency? None – all 1ms or less – and yet there was some noticeable stutter in the replay of a Flash vide from YouTube.
This brings up another point regarding testing the User Experience – find yourself something that you would consider to be a good representation of what the users would normally use and then continue to use that as a reference model against which all solutions can effectively be measured? – I am currently using a High Definition video clip from YouTube from BBC2 that is an underwater shot of Surfing. This can be found here:
The reasons for using this clip as my reference piece is:
Regardless of who I am showing this to – they will instinctively know what it should look like, even if they have never seen the clip before.
Because of the Slow Motion video it will show up any stutter or frame drop quite dramatically
It is available in a number of resolutions – 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p.
It is also quite a good clip and will naturally draw peoples attention
Now after replacing the WiFi with the ethernet cable all seemed to go well at the standard 360p so I thought I’d simply push it higher and all should be OK? Well 480p wasn’t too bad, but anything above that started to suffer, so after doing some checking I noticed that the VDI instance was flat lining the CPU at 100%. So I stopped the VM, added another vCPU and restarted, and then tried again – now it could be run at 720p and only when it was run at 1080p was there some very slight (almost negligible) stutter.
Now this should not be considered as anything like a definitive guide to the performance you might get from RemoteFX – I have had very little time to do any further testing, and next on my list is to get vWorkspace running on this rig so that I can see what difference EOP Xtream makes to these same observations – but in the meantime I’m just sharing my 2 cents worth in the vain hope that it might be useful to someone else?
