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S_Grimbuhler
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PCoIP black screen only with soft client, only external connections

Hi.

Everything is in the title :smileygrin:

I have an infrastructure with 4 ESX 5.0 and a vCenter 5.1 ; 2 VCS 5.1.2 and 1 security gateway (paired with the second VCS) ; View composer.

When connecting from the LAN, using internal VCS address, everything is working fine.

When connecting from WAN, using external URL (www.mycompany.com, with an external IP, registred in public DNS) : everything work fine with an IOS device, or with a zero client (Teradici chipset); but when connecting with a Windows View Client, authentication pass well, but after connected, client shows a black screen. it seems the session is not present in View Manager.

Does anybody have an idea?

thanks in advance for your help.

Best regards.

Stéphane Grimbuhler

Virtualization & Storage Architect (VCP / VCAP-DCA)

VMware Instructor (VCI)

My Blog : www.virtualgeek.ch

Grimbuhler Stéphane (VCP, VCAP-DCA, VCI) www.virtualgeek.ch (My virtualization blog)
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etieseler
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Do you have all the needed ports open in any firewalls between the end user and the Connection Manager / ESX farm? The software client needs RDP (3389) open in addition to the PCoIP ports.

Ed

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LikeABrandit
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I don't know that this will help, but I ran into something similar under View 5.x that ended up being specific to the laptops on the far end. The issue was very odd, I ruled out user, VM, Security Server and connection method. Regardless of which user, VM, Security Server, and connection method was used, if the laptops with the issue were used the user always reported a black screen, even if they'd never encountered the issue before.

As soon as they used an unaffected laptop, the issue was gone. The pools were dedicated, so the users were logging into the same VM each time over an MPLS circuit. We even had the load balancer set to only one Security Server for the MPLS connections. These laptops were all Windows, although of varying OS, make and model as I understood it.

Unfortunately this customer's connections are based overseas and I had no counterpart to assist in troubleshooting, so I was never able to determine the root cause. Those laptops were either replaced or not used for View connections any longer and there have been no issues since.

Long story short, my best guess would be to try ruling out the laptops and any configurations on them if possible. (Including the obvious firewall, just in case.)

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etieseler
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Do you have all the needed ports open in any firewalls between the end user and the Connection Manager / ESX farm? The software client needs RDP (3389) open in addition to the PCoIP ports.

Ed

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Lewis00
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Your seeing the same issue (or close to it) we are having in our enviornment. External connections are getting a Blank\Black screen when connecting via PCoIP. I would ask you if the issue is the same when you connect via the RDP protocol? If so then my quess you be that you are having the same issue we are having. I have been assured that VMware's developers are working on this 5.1.x issue in my ticket I have open with them but unfortunetly the only solution I have found to get my users back up has been to roll the View Agent back to 5.0. I was able to leave my servers and clients at 5.1.x.

The problem seems to reside in the Agent and how it tries to connect with the View Client. Our environment utilizes a VSS with PCoIP Gateway enabled. The firewalls on all ends were disabled and we still received the same result. What we found was that the View Agent was sending out a single packet directly to the IP of the machine running the View Client (basically the IP of your home machine). This packet did not travel along the PCoIP Gateway and would loop within our network going no where. At this point the Agent seemed to wait for either this packet to fail before moving on or something of that nature causing the PCoIP port to become tied up and unavailable. To test this our network team created a terminating point with the same IP of my home computer at which time I was then able to connect via PCoIP without issue. In short the issue seems to be a bug with 5.1.1 and 5.1.2 (tested in my environment at least). I know this information sounds crazy but it is what our research and the log files showed us.

I hope this information helps you out some.

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S_Grimbuhler
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Hi

RDP port was closed.

Thank you very much for your help Ed.

BG

S.

Grimbuhler Stéphane (VCP, VCAP-DCA, VCI) www.virtualgeek.ch (My virtualization blog)
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etieseler
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You're quite welcome. Glad to hear it was an easy fix.

Ed

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