VMware Horizon Community
bjorn_lundquist
Contributor
Contributor

Horizon View Client on a Raspberry Pi 3

Hi all Smiley Happy

I had this idea that the Rapberry Pi 3 would make an absolute perfect thin client for running against our Horizon 7.0.1 environment.

Found an Raspberry Pi project called RPiTC (Raspberry Pi Thin CLient) http://rpitc.blogspot.se/ which would be a good base to work on.

Everything started of just great, we were up'n'running after about 30min Smiley Happy
Now we started with som testing and soon realized that the only thing we could complain about were the really bad audio/video experiense.

I checked the CPU on the Pi and it was overwhelmed with work........

This makes me beleve that the Horizon View Client does't make use of the Pi's hardware H.264 de/encoder but doing all the coding in software.

Does anyone know how to forse the client to use hardware insteed of software en/decoding?

Everything workes great when running from a Windows Client on the same 1G LAN så it shouldn't be a networking issue.

Some usefull info:

Horizon version is 7.0.1

Horizon Guests running on a 4 node Cisco USC cluster with nVidia Grid GPUs, ESX version 6.0.0, 3620759
Guest are standard fully patched Windows 7

Protocol used is Blast.

Thin Clients are Rasberry Pi 3s (which have hardware H.264 en/decoder) running debian and Horizon View Client version 4.1.0

A fully functional Thin View Client for under 80$ would be a dream for many Smiley Happy

Thanks in advance for any tips on how to make this work.

/Björn

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7 Replies
VirtualSven
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

In the release notes of the Horizon client 4.1.0 for Linux it says:

  • H.264 support for Intel-based Linux devices

So not for ARM based devices. There's no new info in the release notes of 4.2.0 version.

Sven Huisman VMware vExpert 2009-2016 Twitter: @svenh blog: svenhuisman.com
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Ken_Mc
Contributor
Contributor

I agree this would be nice to have.  It's a shame VMWare doesn't make a client for ARM based Linux.

I've been tinkering with the RPiTC, but I think having a bare bones linux with just a Horizon client would be ideal.

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AndrewKV
Contributor
Contributor

+1 for Horizon View Client for ARM Linux (aarch64)

P.S. Raspberry Pi Thin Client project - is a great initiative, all the best to that project! I personally tried it and it worked fine for me!

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nickcasa
Contributor
Contributor

I use the Pi from nComputing on Citrix Xendesktop and it's freakin awesome!  Less than $100, makes use of h264 for local rendering.  I can do full screen 4k youtube on 1vcpu, 4gb ram, w7 desktop offloading all processing from the vm to the Pi over crappy wifi with 80ms of latency of so. 

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DanofreIqor
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

No RTAV for ARM through the View client even with the new clients. Means I have no microphone audio. We need VMW to make a View client for ARM.

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DanofreIqor
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We got it to work with the latest image from Stratodesk and the injected Client supporting ARM. 

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