Optimizing Flash Performance

[HMUSA]

I'm evaluating VMware View, and it's feeling like I'm not quite getting the multimedia benefit over just RDP to my vSphere Win7 VMs.  Is there a best practices list for this kind of optimization?  All I've done so far is to edit the Pool settings to use High Quality Flash and toy with giving the VM's more vCPUs or vRAM.

I've been testing various setups, and here's what it seems like from Good to Bad:

Mac VMware View 4.6 Client = Mac RDP > PC VMware View 4.6 Client = Win7 RDP > Wyse Suse Linux Enterprise VMware View 4.5 > Wyse ThinOS RDP.  This pretty much correlates to the end-device's power as I'm using an 8-core Mac, a 2-core PC, an R50LE and a C10LE.

At best, I'm still getting a torn frame here and there, and the sound is a split second behind.  At worst (the Wyse devices), the video is jerky and the sound is consisitently 1-2 seconds behind, although the sound is solid and the stream doesn't break.

Should I be able to do better than this?  Should I turn to the Wyse TCX?  Anyone have good experiences there? Elsewhere?

I'm running a vCenter with two hosts, 8-12cpus each, DAS with plenty capacity: for the host that the test VM is sitting on I'm typically at 5-8%cpu, 40% memory and 40% storage.  I think there's plenty of back-end, running on similarly underutilized GB Ethernet network.

Thanks!

[AndreTheGiant]

RDP is very bad to handle multimedia stream.

IMHO I suggest to move to PCoIP.

If you must use RDP, you must decrease the Flash quality and work with the trottle parameter.

But quality cannot be good (due to the nature of RDP).

Andre

[eeg3 · Accepted solution]

As the above poster said, you should use PCoIP if you want the benefits for a protocol designed for VDI. RDP just isn't going to cut it, although supposedly Ericom is doing some stuff with RDP to enhance it with Blaze.

To enhance it even further, I would suggest using Zero Clients in conjunction with PCoIP for the absolute best experience.

[HMUSA]

Thanks for the comments - I guess I didn't make it clear that I tried and found the PCOIP clients unimpressive. 

Specifically, these are PCOIP clients and I set the server to default to PCOIP:

   VMware View 4.6 Client for Windows

   Wyse Suse Linux Enterprise VMware View 4.5

And their performance pretty much matched their RDP(7) counterparts, didn't beat them.  It leads me to wonder if I'm doing something wrong, hence questioning if there's a best-practices guide of some sort.

Thx again.

[eeg3]

Sorry, I assumed you were using RDP with those. I wasn't all that impressed with Wyse's thin clients with PCoIP either. I'd recommend asking for a demo unit of the Wyse P20. It is a zero client, and the experience is massively better. It's night and day.

[HMUSA]

Good pointer.  I'll try the P20.  A Wyse rep pointed me to the R50LE and I didn't think to double-check her recommendation.

Thanks!

[eeg3]

If you do decide to go with a zero client, all of the vendor's solutions are the exact same. Wyse P20/Dell FX100/etc. are all the exact same client with different brandings. They use the Teradici chipset. You can make them compete against each other for the best price, since the products are identical hardware and software-wise. We did this and were able to get the price on our units lowered significantly.

Thin clients are a lot different since the hardware and software can vary.

[HMUSA]

Got the P20 and am impressed! I see there's a lot of hardware you can throw at performance issues - all the Teradici stuff.  Fascinating.  Thanks for the pointer.

[tacticsbaby]

Another thing you can try to do in order to improve video performance on your Wyse P20 is to install the Wyse video acceleration in VMtools. When you install VMtools this is not installed by default. Hope this is useful. Also, update your Wyse to the latest version of firmware if possible.

[HMUSA]

Just tried to do that, but my VM wouldn't allow it. That is, the VMtools installation kicked out an error saying that Wyse Multimedia Support wasn't installable on my operating system.  (Win7 Pro.)  Maybe RDP7 in Win7 includes everything Wyse uses already... maybe that's more of a blade server to client thing.  <shrug>

[tacticsbaby]

What version of ESX are you running?

[tacticsbaby]

Take a look at this link: http://smartve.com/download.html

Let me know if it helps?

[HMUSA]

ESXi 4.1.0, 348481