Skype for Business 2016 and Horizon View Agent

[Psychomike70]

Sorry if this has been asked or answered.

We have recently found that when we migrated our VDI environment to Windows 10 1709 that the Horizon View 7.5.1 Agent will not allow SfB 2016 (desktop client not Store app) Calls (audio and video). The Call screen will appear and it will just sit at "Calling" until you hang up. The person you are calling will not see a toast notification, and no errors appear to be generated (can't enable Full logging in SfB atm). Looking at a ProcMon capture, we see the TCP connection is made, but no UDP connection is attempted (probably due to the call not being connected). The Desktop Sharing/Presenting and IM portions work correctly. We used the Horizon View Agent 7.5.1 version for several months on Windows 10 1607 without issue. We have verified that the Windows Defender firewall has all the necessary ports open. When we install the VMware Horizon Virtualization Pack for Skype for Business (even though we are using Zero Clients) and attempt to place a call it will generate an error (call ended or can't be connected).

We decided to roll back to Horizon View Agent v7.4.0 and Skype for Business calling works without issue now.

We also tried to use Horizon View Agent 7.6.0 and received the same issues with SfB calling that we saw with the 7.5.1 Agent.

Has anyone experienced issues with SfB Calling not connecting/no toast notification (to internal domain customers) using the 7.5.1 and higher View Agent and Win10 1709?

UPDATE:

Updating the above post:

We have now tested Horizon View Agent 7.7 and Horizon View Agent 7.8 and continue to see the issue where everything works on Skype for Business EXCEPT Audio and Video calls. Using the Horizon View Agent 7.4 still works without issues. No one else using Windows 10 1709 is seeing this issue? Again, we are using Teradici Zero Clients, so the SfB Optimization pack Agent option is not installed.

We will be opening a SR here in the coming weeks, but wanted to see if the community has any ideas/thoughts etc...

[GTO455]

Hi Psychomike70,

Did you ever find a solution to this?

I'm experiencing the same issues with Windows 10 1803, SfB 2016, and the View 7.10 client.

I also have an 1809 pool with the 7.10 client and SfB 2016, and video calling works without issue.

Any light you can shed on this for 1803 would be appreciated!

Charlie

[Psychomike70]

Yep, we sure did. We worked with VMware Engineering to figure out that the Blast Ports were interfering with Skype ports. Below is a copy of the what we did:

"Engineering updated today and they want to eliminate the Blast Ports from interfering with the Skype Ports as Blast will always regardless of installation type take over and bind to ports. Which would make sense with the Media Port errors we are seeing. This is what we discussed awhile back with Caution-http://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52558 < Caution-http://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52558 >

Steps:

You will want to uninstall the View Agent and reboot.

Install using command line.

Make sure the Terdici audio driver is present.

Release the IP on the VM and power down. (just do this on the IPI)

Take a snapshot.

Create a test pool

Login and test with the Zero Client.

Here is the install example from command line:

VMware-viewagent-y.y.y-xxxxxx.exe /s /v"/qb VDM_VC_MANAGED_AGENT=1 ADDLOCAL=BlastUDP,Core,VMWMediaProviderProxy,ClientDriveRedirection,RTAV VDM_SERVER_NAME=FQDN VDM_SERVER_USERNAME=domain\administrator VDM_SERVER_PASSWORD=enter password BLAST_UDP_STARTING_PORT=65000 BLAST_UDP_PORT_RANGE=512"

NOTE: add BLAST_UDP_STARTING_PORT=65000 BLAST_UDP_PORT_RANGE=512 to the current installer"

After adding those options to our install script, we were able to update to 7.6, 7.8 and now to 7.10 without any issues with audio/video calling and Skype for Business 2016. This solved it for our Win10 1709 pools so we just carried it over to the Win10 1803/1809 pools just to be safe.

[GTO455]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the quick response!

I thought I was home free until I read that you were using Blast. Unfortunately we are using PCOIP for our environment.

Back to the drawing board!

Thanks,

Charlie

[Psychomike70]

We are actually using PCoIP as default. We add that string in regarding Blast as it is installed by Default with the Horizon View Agent. This is what made it work for PCoIP...Funny thing is now that we have a lot of people working remotely, we want to actually use Blast but we are right back where we started...when connecting using Blast we can't get Audio/Video calls to connect using Skype for Business....so we had to revert the pools back to using PCoIP by default so we could use Skype Audio/Video calling (again with adding the start port piece to our agent install).