Bandwidth requirements for PCoIP over the WAN

[Raresh]

I have a new environment that is going to use Wyse P20 zero clients (firmware 3.3) with VMware View 4.6. I am using Composer and the Connection server. The remote users are connected via MPLS (1.5Mb T1 speed) and there are about 3-4 users at each location all using dual monitors. I haven't deployed any zero clients yet to any of the remote offices, but I am concerned with the ability to run PCoIP over the MPLS. There is other traffic coming through each circuit to HQ such as video cameras and VoIP. It appears that I need to use PCoIP to support the dual monitors and RDP is not an option I should consider. There is enough bandwidth at HQ through the MPLS, but each remote office is connected via 1.5Mb. Do any of you have any experience with running the P20 or something similar over the WAN (such as MPLS) in a VMware View environment? I would appreciate any possible solution, workarounds, or simply your experience with such an environment.

[idle-jam]

have a look at this: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/precn/en/remote_access_device_network_considerations.p...

[gunnarb]

That document is ancient!  Just look at the UDP ports used in that, it must be 4 years old.

2-4 users on a T1 should be fine, but it does depend on the type of work they will be doing.  Standard task workers I'd expect you'd have fine performance, high end multimedia users will choke it.

Feel free to shoot an email to support@teradici.com if you'd like some direct help with this.

Offically speaking in just about every updated doc that is out there 2-4 office type users are supported on a T1.

-Gunnar

[Raresh]

Gunnar - I configured 4 users (at the same remote office) using the Wyse P20 clients along with their VoIP phones and I am getting good performance so far. The virtual desktops and highly customized and the users do not require multimedia applications. In fact I am blocking access to sites that would generate additional bandwidth. Also, I am using the PCoIP group policies to restrict the use of the available bandwidth (1.5Mb in my case). I am in the process of setting up Solarwinds to capture the utilization between sites and will post back so everyone can use this info.

- Richie

[gunnarb]

Great!

If you send me your pcoip_server.log files I'll graph them out for you.

What you set your Max, Floor and Image Quality settings to?

-Gunnar

[Raresh]

I am not sure which logs you would need or where they are located...

Here are my current settings:

- Minimum Image quality = 40

- Maximum image quality = 70

- Maximum frame rate = 12

- PCoIP session bandwidth in kilobits per second = 1230

- Disable Audio = Enabled

Richie

[gunnarb]

On the VM, do a search for pcoip_server.log (it is located inside of your %appdata% directory).  That logs shows active bandwidth.

-Gunnar

[Raresh]

Gunnar,

Sorry for the late follow up...I would still like to know how much (on average) a PCoIP session consumes. I attached a log from one of the virtual desktops that uses 800x600 resolution dual monitors.

Do you have a tool that outputs the bandwidth or do you just read it from the log? Thanks for your help.

Richie

[gunnarb]

A little bit of both:

Your average TX is 86k
Your average RX is 35k
The highest peek you had was 696k at 9:37
You had a couple spikes of packet loss during the session
Your latency fluctuated between 10-25ms for the most part.

I couldn't get the graph to emmbed so I attached it.

-Gunnar

[Raresh]

Thanks a lot.

Is this tool available? It would be nice if I could graph some of the other sessions that use a higher resolution to compare between them.

The average TX and RX are actually not bad...

- Richie.

[gunnarb]

The tool I use it not publicly available, however excel works wonders. I actually used excel to get your averages.