#pcoip

by Steven Dunne

Earlier this year, I was engaged for a couple of days, to help a customer pilot the PCoIP protocol using Horizon with View 6, with the primary driver to deliver multimedia and video across WAN links.

This blog provides a summary of my findings including tools, tweaks, tips and resources I used.

Typically, whilst this is an excellent use case for PCoIP, the customer requirements and constraints were going to test PCoIP capabilities to the full. Also, as best we try to reason with the customer and set out reasonable expectations with these constraints in mind, there’s always the demand for the technology to do more. As expected, PCoIP was being evaluated against other protocols, using RDS Sessions (2008 R2), rather than full Windows 7/8 desktops. Endpoints devices were a mix of new Dell Wyse Thin Clients.

The customer was preparing to test PCoIP from the following locations connected by MPLS:-

India – 150ms RTT and 10Mbps link

Canada – 75ms RTT and 200Mbps link

No further information regarding expected concurrent users or current link utilisation was available during this short engagement.

By using the MPLS, at least the PCoIP protocol doesn’t have to traverse the internet and go through numerous additional hops. This provides additional benefits such as reduced latency and having access to those devices across the WAN from the service provider.

In addition, there was a requirement to identify the ‘lowest point’ that could deliver video playback with ‘acceptable’ performance. This doesn’t mean smooth, perfect or flawless playback, just acceptable enough to the end user, with a consistent experience which is essential.

Testing had been carried out previously with another protocol and delivered very good video (to my eyes) at 384Kbps, which I was impressed with to say the least.

WAN Testing and Simulation

Initial testing was carried out using a WAN simulator software, Soft Perfect WAN emulator, which the customer had purchased in advance.

The conditions were set with RTT latency and bandwidth for each location, and I verified some kind of accuracy of the tool, by using ping commands to check for latency and Speedtest.net. The tool was fairly accurate based upon several results, although it was the first time I’ve come across the tool. We didn’t induce packet loss or random packet ordering for the testing, we kept the testing simple and were looking to monitor real WAN testing to discover this information.

PCoIP Settings

The following PCoIP settings were identified and tuned to find the optimal experience. I’ve added some notes around PCoIP behavior I observed during testing at 384kbps

Note: View 6.0 has introduced new PCoIP defaults to provide further optimization out of the box and specifically for WAN environments. These have been highlighted in the table.

Note: A number of these settings are dynamic and it’s useful to change these settings whilst a PCoIP session is running, and then monitor (visually) the changes from the PCoIP session.

SettingDescriptionDefault Value

PCoIP Maximum Bandwidth LimitSet a limit on the bandwidth a PCoIP session can use90000kbps

Build-to-losslessBuilds the image to a completely lossless state, pixel perfect image. Only required in special uses cases. Disabling this can reduce bandwidth demands greatly.Disabled (Previously Enabled in View 5.x)

PCoIP Maximum Image QualityA lower initial maximum image quality will reduce the bandwidth required back at the expense of image quality.80 (reduced from 90)

PCoIP Minimum Image QualityTrades off display image quality with display frame update.40 (reduced from 50)

Frame Rate LimitSet a limit on the display update rate. Can reduce bandwidth but as the cost of smooth motion30

Audio LimitConfigures audio compressing. The resulting audio bandwidth will be near or below the limit500kbps

PCoIP Tuning – Observations

The PCoIP ADM templates were imported and applied locally on the RDSH server and are downloaded via theHorizon Extras Bundle.

PCoIP Maximum Bandwidth Limit

If the use case is a bandwidth constrained environment, configure this setting with the bandwidth limit in mind to prevent the PCoIP session trying to burst beyond the available link bandwidth, which will degrade performance and likely cause packet loss and poor user experience.

For example, if the link is 384kbps, configure this setting as 384kbps

Ideally you wouldn’t limit this too much because PCoIP is a ‘bursty’ protocol and likes to use available network bandwidth to increase performance.

It’s not recommended to multiply this limit by the number of concurrent users expected. Better to cap a percentage of the link.

PCoIP Maximum Image Quality

This setting has more impact than ‘Minimum Image Quality’, so initial focus and attention should be here.

Default of 80 – Can reduce to 70 for WAN environments, however going too low reduces the quality, so it’s a trade-off scenario.

Reducing this setting will decrease bandwidth used and allow Imaging Frame (FPS) to increase

FPS will increase slightly but ultimately more available bandwidth = more FPS

PCoIP Minimum Image Quality

Default of 40 – Can reduce to 30 (lowest) or 35 in congested WAN environments

I didn’t notice much visual change here or from observing the PCoIP Statistics Viewer graphs.

Frame Rate Limit

Default of 30 – If no multimedia required, could reduce to around 12

On the LAN with no restrictions (PCOIP max), the embedded videos being played in IE, would use around 28-29 FPS for flawless playback

With the 384 PCoIP Max, reducing this setting to 12, 15 or 18 had little impact in changing the observed FPS numbers, as FPS was dictated by available bandwidth (restricted by the PCoIP Max Session) and Max Image Quality (if this setting was reduced, a slight increase in FPS was observed).

Audio Limit

Default of 500kbps – Should reduce in constrained scenario to 100kbps-150kbps

At 384kbps bandwidth limit – PCoIP would never increase audio beyond 42kbps

As soon as the bandwidth limit and Max PCoIP session increased to 1024kbps, audio bandwidth used was double to 80kbps, which was a much more acceptable experience.

You can download the Teradici Audio driver and apply this if audio is causing issues, although I didn’t implement this. More information on this area can be found in this blog post.

If I set the PCoIP audio limit to 75, 100, 150 or 200, this made no difference (still 42kbps)

PCoIP Client Image Cache Size

Default setting – the cache is for static content only, rather than video or dynamic content, therefore less effective in this scenario.

PCoIP Transport Header

Default (Medium) – The PCoIP transport header allows network devices to make better prioritization/QoS decisions when dealing with network congestion. The transport header is enabled by default.

 This can be set to ‘Highest’, but it’s not a change I’ve seen recommended before.

PCoIP Monitoring

Horizon with View (vRealize Operations Manager), previously vCOPs for View (V4V). See this post

Perfmon or WMI counters inside the Windows session

PCoIP Session Statistics Viewer – Downloadable from Teradici.com

PCoIP Config Tool

PCoIP Log Viewer

Although doesn’t seem to work inside Windows 2008 RDS sessions

The logs would not parse for View Agent 6.01

I’ve previously always used the last two tools, however since the creator has moved on from VMware, I can appreciate that these tools may have not been kept up-to-date, for the latest versions.

Instead, I used the PCoIP Session Statistics Viewer tool from Teradici, it’s easy to use and presents the session data in easy to consume graphs and charts. There is where you can track the tweaks to PCoIP above and see how this impacts the current session.

RDSH Tuning

As the customer was using Windows Server 2008 R2 RDS Sessions via Horizon View, there was some additional tweaks I applied to make sure the server was an optimised as possible for best performance.

Enabled Windows Desktop Experience

RDSH Optimiser tool

VMware Windows Guest OS Optimisation tool using Windows Server 2008 template

See Horizon 6 RDSH Performance and Best Practices

Applied some Outlook. Office and general Windows tweaks, although the documentation is lacking for the specifics. If you run the tool it will produce a small output of the changes

Note: Take a snapshot or backup before running and applying the changes these tools implement

Internet Explorer

Upgraded from IE9 to IE11

Latest version of Flash player

Disable Hardware Acceleration, this can make a noticeable difference.

More Tools

I utilised a few other tools which can be very helpful,

Teradici.com tools are highly recommended

PCoIP Bandwidth Calculator.xls

PCoIP Session Statistics Viewer (see above)

Monitor FPS in real-time inside Windows

Network Emulator\Simulator

Soft Perfect (shown below).

WANEM

Final Thoughts

PCoIP defaults are pretty accurate for the WAN, only a small amount of tweaking is required.

Network infrastructure for PCoIP is no 1! PCoIP uses UDP, so UDP packets are always going to have less priority on the network during contention than TCP. Their phase is more important and effective than playing around with the PCOIP settings. Consult the resources below.

LAN performance for video playback from the browser was flawless (as expected), with no PCoIP session restrictions or network simulators.

Don’t constrain PCoIP too heavily and understand the behaviour (it’s UDP, dynamic and bursty naturally).

Set user expectation – There’s only so much you can do and achieve using the protocol with limited bandwidth.

Real WAN testing holds the key, as protocol latency, session reliability and packet loss all come into play.

Horizon View 6 is missing some form of flash re-direction, which the competing solution had, with the ability to support this using RDS sessions. Horizon View is behind in this respect.

Despite the above point, real world testing across the WAN, with feedback from the customer adding that PCoIP was out performing the competition.

Additional Resources

PCoIP Protocol Virtual Desktop Network Design Checklist

VMware View 5 PCoIP Network Optimization Guide

Horizon 6 RDSH Performance and Best Practices

This guide is key and should be the first point of optimisation, before any of the above. The network infrastructure and devices are the critical element here, as PCoIP is a network protocol after all!

Drills into the above PCoIP settings, configuration, use cases, scenarios and sizing calculators in detail!

VMworld Sessions

I can’t recommend these sessions enough, definitely the first place to go for PCoIP, a lot of gold and nuggets from the presenters. You can find my notes from the sessions here.

About the Author – Steve Dunne

Steve Dunne joined the Xtravirt consulting team in May 2012. With over 13 years of IT infrastructure experience, Steve has worked on a wide variety of engagements including Virtual Desktop Design/Optimise, Virtual Infrastructure Build/Optimise, IT Transformation, Data Centre Migration, Server Consolidation and Infrastructure Upgrades.

In 2015, Steve achieved the VMware vExpert award for the second year running.

Blog: www.virtuallyvirtuoso.com Twitter: @stevied_82

Someone told me about PCOIP a few days ago:

http://www.teradici.com/pcoip-technology.php

I sit down with F5 Solution Architect Paul Pindell to get an inside look at BIG-IP's native support for VMware's PCoIP protocol.  He reviews the architecture, business value and gives a great demo on how to configure BIG-IP.

Assumption:

You have a group & profile already created in the PCoIP Management Console with at least the bootstrap URL to View (or Imprivata OneSign) host.

You have a Zero Client that has never been associated with your PCoIP Management Console

Procedure:

On the Zero Client itself click Options -> Configuration

In the Label tab set the PCoIP Device Name to whatever you desire

Click OK

Reset the Zero Client

Log in to your PCoIP Management Console

On the Devices tab highlight your new Zero Client (usually named something like (Discovered XXXXXXX-XX)

In the Grouping section on the lower right of the screen select your preset group & click Add & then Close on the Alert prompt

Note: This will change the device name to what you set in step 2

Click on device and select Click to view Details

In the Device Details screen click Reapply Profile

In the Apply Profile pop-up set the reboot behavior to Automatically & click OK