Audio lag with View 4.6 and Windows 7

[VMmatty]

I'm trying to stand up a View 4.6 environment for development/testing.  I've been able to create a new master image and deploy a bunch of linked clones very quickly and easily.  My issue is with performance for VMs running Windows 7.

The image I'm using is pretty basic - it's just Windows 7 (either x86 or x64) with the View Agent installed as well as basics like Windows Updates, Flash, etc.  One thing I'm noticing is that the audio is slightly delayed when connecting using either PCoIP or RDP.  For example, watching a video in YouTube shows audio slightly out of sync with the video.  Even basic system sounds (like the ding you get when you click something you shouldn't) is slightly delayed from when you release the mouse.

For what it's worth, I am using basically the same exact image for a XenDesktop 5 environment with the only difference being the XenDesktop specific agent installed.  I don't see this problem at all in that desktop, so I'm guessing the issue isn't something in my environment specifically.  This is not meant to be a XD/ICA vs. View/PCoIP comparison thread - I'm only stating it to show that I don't have this problem when using XD on the same physical hardware and connecting from the same workstation.

Here are some more specifics about my environment:

Host: ESX 4.1

VM: Windows 7 Enterprise, x86 (2GB of RAM, 1 vCPU, vmxnet3 driver)

View version: 4.6

Client access device: Dell Latitude E6410, Windows 7 Enterprise x64 w/ 4GB of RAM

I'm connecting over the LAN, there are no AD policies configured for View, and I'm not doing any sort of Flash throttling in the pool settings, etc.

Any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong here?  I assume this cannot be normal or expected behavior.

Thanks in advance.

Matt

[VMmatty]

One more thing to add - I tried increasing the resources of the VM to 2 vCPUs and 3GB of RAM and see the same behavior.

I'd appreciate any other thoughts or ideas.  Thanks..

[mittim12]

Just bumping this up to see if anyone has any ideas.  

[mvaughn25 · Accepted solution]

Anyone working with PCoIP, needs to sign up for a free account with Teradici at http://techsupport.teradici.com. I regularly go there and read updates under the "Product and Tech Notices" section on the left toolbar (you can also subscribe to the four categoreis under here). Teradici released an updated audio driver on January 6, 2011 (Product and Tech Notices -> Current PCoIP Products and Releases -> Teradici Virtual Audio Driver). Replace the VMware tools audio driver with that one, it also adds a microphone driver if you need that.

Since PCoIP does not split audio/video into different streams, there should be no sync issue. I would first go into vCenter, open a console on the VM used as the base image for the pool (same snapshot level), or the dedicated VM if that is how you are setup, and see if you experience the same issue without View/PCoIP in the mix. May be a local issue and not related to how you are connecting.

Also make sure the pool is set to PCoIP only, so we know RDP is not in play.

----UPDATE----

My bad, the console connection has no audio. I hate to say it, but try RDP to the base VM or golden image. I am basically looking to see if any other connection to the VM has the same issue, or if it is only when connecting through View/PCoIP. If using RDP, you may be able to grab the IP of a VM in the pool and go directly to it without using the baseVM /golden image.

[VMmatty]

Just wanted to follow up on this and close the loop.  I have decided to scrap the View lab for now and will write this off as some kind of wacky configuration in the lab and nothing specific to View.  I still don't get why the exact same image (literally the same VMDK) worked great with XenDesktop but with View I had the audio lag.  Still I'm going to call it a misconfiguration and not worry about it.

Thanks for your help!

Matt

http://www.thelowercasew.com