wponder

It has almost been one year since I started being able to use the PCoIP software implementation we have been collaborating on. There has been a lot of questions about how is PCoIP for WAN delivered desktops?

There is no doubt or question delivering a desktop experience across the WAN is one of the most challenging aspects of virtual desktops. From extremely low bandwidth, high latency environments to wildly imaginative ideas of what it takes to deliver a rich PC like experiance. The great part for customers is loads of R&D dollars have been going into this area for the last few years and every day the possibilities expand further. PCoIP was one of the first technoliges to tackle the most demanding needs of high end users across the WAN by delivering 3D initially with their hardware solution.

Putting aside religion for the moment; regarding what realistically can be delivered across a WAN, what it really takes to do it and the pros and cons of any given approach. I simply wanted to share a day in my life. I have been working from some type of WAN delivered desktop for 8 plus years now. Sure, I have a laptop and it sits right beside me in my case waiting for my next trip. Even when traveling, I primarily connect to my remote virtual desktop.

One exmple of walking the talk, at VMworld 2009 I delivered my presentation using a early beta version of PCoIP from the same remote virtual desktop I work in everyday. Not something I personally have seen done at other large events That is just how natural it comes to me, though. If you have a VMworld login you can watch that session here.

For a little bit of background. I primarily work remotely from my home office in Boise. My Virtual Desktop is hosted somewhere in Palo Alto. Currently, it resides in what I call the wild wild west because it is our engineering View Manger environment that is always running the most recent beta or released version of View Manager. Client and agents are always mismatched and I never know when one of the offline engineers is checking out one or more VMs. No, I am not recommending you do the same. I just have not gotten around to having my VM moved .

My home connectivity is cable with a standard 10MB down, 1MB up connection. My VPN connection to Palo Alto is limited to 1MB.

I share this connection with another full time work from home user.

My typical latency is to my virtual desktop in Palo Alto is 45ms depending on what is going on. It was 400ms the other day during a large FTP transfer.

While writing this blog entry and recording the video below my connectivity was well below my subscription with my uplink only reaching 255Kbps. While working CSI on CBS.com was being watched by someone else.

I have dual line Vonage VoIP service shared across the same cable connection.

My thin client is a WES based thin client with dual 19" monitors at 1280x1024 32bit color

My Virtual Desktop is configured with a single vGPU and 785 Mbytes of RAM

My desktop current has themeing turned on and my desktop settings are set to maximize for appearance not performance.

My daily activity is connecting to my remote virtual desktop from my thin client across the standard VMware Juniper SSL VPN. Their policy is to limit each connection to 1MB.

This is a day in the life of my virtual desktop experience. I do all my day to day work in my virtual desktop along side the barrage of conference calls. Web Browsing, Email, Instant Messaging. All my product requirements docs, presentations, even this blog are all done remotely.

I have made a short video below demonstrating my remote virtual desktop in Palo Alto connecting from here in Boise using the GA version of VMware View with PCoIP. Because could be hard to see here is an inventory of what I have had running over the last few weeks ( I am really bad about cleaning things up)

• Outlook with 24 open / draft emails
• 8 Word Docs
• Two PowerPoint presentations
• 17 Firefox tabs
• 1 instance of calculator
• 8 Internet Explorer tabs
• 1 Command Window
• 2 instances of Paint
• 1 instance of Pidgin IM

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This year I was not able to attend Synergy, but I have been getting real time reports from friends and associates who are there. So, there will not be any notifications of failed demo's from me. I have been getting reports second hand from the show that Mark Templton has made some surprising comments and positioning on stage during the keynote.

Note!!!!! This is all second hand, call it FUD, bull or whatever you want. I was not there and did not hear it first hand.

First there was a demonstration of some of the existing and future capabilities of HDX. Things like Multimedia redirection that we have been shipping with View for some time now for RDP. During this part of the keynote there was a comparison to an unnamed protocol. I can only venture to guess that would be RDP and the comparison showed ICA performing better. Surprisingly there are reports that it was stated that the other protocol was equal to ICA on the LAN. Again, this is why I am assuming why the comparison was to RDP.

Afterwards, it was reported that was followed by a statement that PCoIP is better on the LAN than ICA. Of course, we would also agree with that.

If the reports are true which I hope they are, that only leaves the WAN and some outlying feature functionality. There is no question that the ICA team has been plugging away at WAN challenges for a long time. Some of that changes with PortICA as they work to unify the core protocol features between ICA and PortICA. That said, the bar is set.

Brian Madden's live blogging was one of the sources I saw the reports from. You can also follow along here....

Check out the 11:27 and 11:30 time stamp - http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2009/05/05/live-blogging-the-citrix-synergy-keynote.aspx

The biggest question many have is what VMware and Teradici are doing? I have not been doing the best job sharing information here as the 1:1 interaction has been a bit overwhelming.

One of my goals is to improve that. However, I was able to give both Brian Madden and Chris Wolf sneak peaks a few months back.

http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=239

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/tv/archive/2009/02/26/brian-madden-tv-episode-3-vmworld-europe-2009-news-amp-wrap-up.aspx

For anyone that did not have the chance to see my VMwold presentation at VMworld EMEA. The goal is clear. Provide a dispaly protocol fit for users from the Task worker to the Designer. That includes both the LAN and the WAN. We do not want to just provide the best user experiance on the LAN but we also want to provide the best experiance on the WAN as well. Through our partnership and co-development with Teradici and based on the inital feedback we feel we are on the right track. In the end, cusotmers will have a broad array of solutions to choose from both physical and virtual including both tera enabled portals and soft clients all supported and managed with VMware View Manager.

Understand, anyone that has not seen what we have is skeptical and it is our responsibility to prove otherwise. Stay tuned for that, as we have more to come, and more to share and are working hard to bring it to you sooner rather than later.