Zoom issues using VDI with Remote Thin Clients and UAG's

[GTO455]

Hello,

Looking for some assistance on using Zoom in our VDI environment, mostly for users logging in remotely using Dell thin clients (and UAG's for authentication). We are using VDI with PCoIP in our environment.

If I log in remotely using a thin client, authenticate through the UAG's, get assigned a desktop and fire up Zoom, the experience is horrible, and basically unusable. Audio and video is choppy and frequently freezes up. VDI resources are not an issue, CPU/RAM/GPU are all under 50% utilized with Zoom running. All other apps work fine.

However, if I connect to our corporate network using a laptop with a traditional VPN, and use the Horizon Client to connect to the same pool, Zoom works MUCH better in VDI.

I understand that it should be better over the VPN because of dedicated resources vs. shared, but the difference is night/day.

Made some typical optimizations and other registry changes to the VDI image to for situations where high latency could be an issue, but that has not made a difference.

UAG's are behind the corporate firewall and F5 load balancers, and the only ports open for remote connectivity are 443 and 4172 (PCoIP). Connection servers on the internal network are also behind a F5 load balancer.

VDI image has all the latest updates and agents, and all applications are local, no AppStacks involved.

Environmental Specs

• Horizon 7.10 ESB
• DEM 9.9
• Instant Clones
• Windows 10 1909 (Ent.) 4 CPU/10 GB RAM/ 75GB Disk 
• NVidia M10 (1GB Profile per user)
• Zoom Client for VDI (5.4.58716)
• Zoom Plugin for VMWare Horizon (5.4.58714)
• Dell 5470 Thin Clients
• UAG 20.09

Other than Zoom, the environment with the remote thin clients and UAG's work great, but my boss considers this Zoom issue a "showstopper" and is hesitant to release this service to our users until this is resolved.

I know there are a lot of moving parts to this environment, but I am hoping someone else has run into this same or similar issue and can offer some suggestions!

Thanks!

C

[mdh0152]

@GTO455 So our zoom works very well. 

Like I said I would make sure you have the "Zoom Horizon" package installed on the thin client version 5.4.* (You can get this from Dell) 

Confirm it's installed - Float bar > Settings > System Tools > Packages

Also make sure that your Zoom client for VDI is installed on the virtual machine and you're on the latest version we ran into the same issue with an earlier version of 5.4. 

If it's still giving issues I guess I would try to contact Dell and see if they can find anything. 

[GTO455]

@mdh0152 

Are you replying to the post I made regarding the performance?

I can confirm we are at 9.1.1 and the Zoom package is installed, the BIOS on the thin client is also up to date.

Zoom package and plugin on the VDI VM is the latest as well.

I just noticed last night during testing that plugging the webcam in after the the VDI session seems to work better than booting the thin client up with the webcam plugged in. Wondering if anyone else has noticed this as well.

[ofox]

GTO455,

We have this tried in our lab, but did not find the difference you observed.

"

One thing I did find is if you boot the the client with the webcam connected and start a zoom session, the performance is very laggy, and the camera is not even listed in the Peripherals section of ThinOS.

However, if you start a VDI session with the webcam unplugged, and plug in your webcam after you have logged into Windows, and fire up Zoom, the video is MUCH better. There is no lag, but the resolution kinda sucks. And I can see the webcam in Peripherals.

Can someone else please try this and see if they get the same results?

"

[Alberte1]

If you have your webcam plugged into the thin client, check the ThinOS settings | peripherals | camera tab.  Verify your camera is in the drop down box for the device and try a preview.  If all works well there, save your settings.  Now when you stare a VDI session and open a Zoom call the video device should default to same as system.  You could also check the Zoom settings | statistics panel and verify the Version is 5.4.6. or higher.  This is the Zoom VDI client version.  Anything lower may not work well with the Zoom VDI plugin the is part of the ThinOS 9.1 Zoom package.  When all is configured correctly this is what I see in Zoom statistics:

[mdh0152]

Another thing I think I should note. 

We noticed our zoom resolution was stuck at 360p. If you have a pro license you're eligible for 720.  

We had to contact zoom support in order to get bumped up to 720p.

Not sure if this is helpful but another thing I've noticed. 

[GTO455]

Thanks. I will look into this as soon as I can get my thin clients to work consistently with 9.1.

We use smart cards and having issues with ThinOS recognizing the cards/certificates. ThinOS 8.6 works fine though.

Never a dull moment.

[Alberte1]

Does anyone notice the Agent and Bios version for a Thin client on ThinOS is not correct in WMS?  If I look at system information on the thin client my Bios is at 1.8.  But WMS reports 1.7.1.  The agent version in WMS says 5.0.0.1 but ThinOS reports VMware Horizon: 2006.8.0.0

Anyone know what Agent version in WMS is supposed to mean?

[CraigD]

Good, needed post.  Thanks.

Little bit of a tangent here, and I'm asking this because I can't make sense of the (little bit of) info on the Zoom site... but I'm in a standard desktop / VMware Horizon VDI desktop setup.  I've now installed the Zoom VDI client into my image and have in a test pool.  I've installed the ZoomVmwareMediaPlugin onto my desktop computer (where my camera is physically connected).

Do I need to do any configuration to make the Zoom components optimize themselves?  Does the plugin piggyback on the Horizon Client?

I can't quite wrap my head around how this thing works/is supposed to work.

[monikeo]

Any update on this?  I have the same setup with the Zoom for VDI on the VDI VMs and the Zoom Plugin for VMware Horizon Client (MediaPlugin) on the client computers.  Zoom meeting works great with video (and virtual background) and audio.  Zoom Phone sounds terrible to the destination calls.  The source caller can hear the destination people just fine.  Weird. 

[GTO455]

Yep, I'm still having issues with Zoom (and Teams) in general, and I'm afraid I can't help you with Zoom Phone. But, do you have anything setup for PCoIP in your GPO's? There is a setting for PCoIP session audio bandwidth under Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/PCoIP Session Variables/Overridable Administrator Defaults/Configure the PCoIP session audio bandwidth limit

[GTO455]

I just wanted to give an update on this post. Since the original post, we have upgraded a few things. Here is the current list.

Environmental Specs

• Horizon 7.13 ESB
• DEM 9.11
• Instant Clones
• Windows 10 20H2 (Ent.) 4 CPU/16 GB RAM/ 75GB Disk 
• NVidia M10 (1GB Profile per user)
• Zoom Client for VDI (5.5)
• Zoom Plugin for VMWare Horizon (5.5)
• Dell 5470 Thin Clients
• UAG 21.03.1

We finally got our smart cards working with ThinOS 9.1 (9.1.2101), and everything seemed to be working fine on our LAN using the thin clients until we used them to connect to our Horizon environment through the UAG's over the WAN and tried to use Zoom and/or Teams. This time I don't think it is isolated to the thin clients.

If you are RECEIVING video from either Zoom or Teams in a VDI session using the UAG's and thin clients, it works great. Screen sharing works, whiteboard, presentations, etc. Even streaming services such as YouTube, CNN, Fox all work great. No lag or performance issues.

However, if you are SENDING video, it is absolutely HORRIBLE for everyone who has tried it, so its not isolated to one person with a crappy ISP. At most we are getting 1fps sending through Zoom and Teams.

I have checked everything I can think of. The network utilization on the VMware environment where the UAG's sit is fine. I have even tried disabling any performance settings in any GPO's we had set for PCoIP.

The Network guys have gotten involved and haven't found any issues with the network or the F5's. I have placed a call to VMware support, but am yet to hear back.

Anyone else ever experience something like this?

[ofox]

1FPS is way too slow and would not work well for a video call. Have you checked the CPU usage of the thin client when the issue was happening? We used to see some lagging issue with a low-end thin client due to poor CPU capability.