VMware Horizon Community
billmaxpowers
Contributor
Contributor

20 to 30 second black screen on reconnecting with PCoIP and Blast

   We are having an issue with a 20 to 30 second black screen on reconnecting a active sessions, in both Win 7 and Win 10 desktops. It happens on both PCoIP and Blast. We tested RDP with no issue, it connects right away. This issue has been going on awhile but most users are login off and locking back in. There is no delay with that, it connects right a away and you see the login process.

48 Replies
BenFB
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Which versions of Horizon Agent and VMware Tools are you running? I've seen this with older versions or if the VM is starved for CPU/memory.

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billmaxpowers
Contributor
Contributor

We are currently using 7.8 in agent and 10.3.2.9925305, be we have see it since version 6.5. Happens with both win7 and win 10 desktop. Our win10 are assigned 2 CPU with 2 Core per Socket.

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vJoeG
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

How about your memory settings in the Master image.

The number of monitors and video ram? See below on one of my images I have 2 displays and 96mb ram

HorizonMaster-VideoOptions.png

------------------
Joe Graziano
Senior Solution Engineer - EUC Federal
VCP7-DTM, VCP6-DM, VCP6-DCV
vExpert, vExpertPro
jgraziano@vmware.com
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billmaxpowers
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, video look good, it is managed by Horizon.

pastedImage_0.png

Also, we tested adding more CPUs to the VM and we get the same result.

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billmaxpowers
Contributor
Contributor

Thinking it might be the CPU. We are using the following setting:

pastedImage_0.png

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andiwe79
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Did you try disabling the 3D Graphics Acceleration?

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billmaxpowers
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, we tried that, but we are using vGPU cards. I happens with it on and off. It looks CPU driven. When we reconnect it spikes the CPU at 100%.

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andiwe79
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

If you are using vGPU then maybe it is a NVIDIA Driver related issue.

I had some issues at Customers with this when Driver Versions did not match or NVIDIA Licensing Server had issues.

Could be worth checking this.

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billmaxpowers
Contributor
Contributor

Unfortunately, it happens with the GPU disabled.

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sjesse
Leadership
Leadership

Do you use appvolumes, there was a version that caused this, which I think is fixed in one of the newer versions.

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VDINinja311
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

sjesse

Do you happen to know which version had the issue?

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sjesse
Leadership
Leadership

Think pre 2.13.2?

VMware App Volumes 2.13.2 Release Notes

Resolved Issues

  • A recalculation operation performed in a Microsoft Excel application (that was installed in base) takes twice the time when an Appstack is attached.
  • On upgrading from App Volumes 2.12.1 to 2.13.1, machines created with the same name as machines that were marked as offline in the database prior to upgrade, throw a "virtualization disabled" error at login.
  • The PATH environment variable does not retain all the path strings captured during provisioning.
  • Writable volume space is getting filled up automatically even when users do install any applications or modify the user profile, leading to low writable disk space.
  • Occurrence of blank screen upon disconnect and reconnect of View sessions.
  • When there are agent machines online for more than 1 year, the message "Server error" is displayed on opening the Online Entities tab in App Volumes Manager and no Online Entities data is seen.
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JohnTwilley
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

We have the same issue with one of our Windows 10 Builds. The following resolved it for us.

Try reinstalling everything in the proper order:

Uninstall order:

  1. NVIDIA drivers and reboot
  2. VMware App Volumes agent and reboot
  3. VMware UEM agent and reboot
  4. VMware Horizon Agents and reboot
  5. VMware Tools and reboot

The following order can be used with a clean installation:

  1. VMware Tools
  2. VMware Horizon View Agent
  3. View Agent Direct-Connection
  4. VMware User Environment (UEM) agent
  5. VMware App Volumes (Agent)
  6. NVIDIA drivers
mchadwick19
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

So we fought with this with NVIDIA for quite some time. What we found to help was before pushing your image out to a pool was to create a manual pool and break SSO on the VM so you don't log into it with an AD profile (or leave the gold image unjoined).

Connect to it with Blast and PCoIP and sit at the Windows account screen and make sure it comes up, resize the screen to force it to rescale, and then disconnect. RDP to the VM and do your cleanup/sealing prior to pushing it to a Linked-Clone/Instant Clone pool.

Seems to cut that time from 20/30 seconds to sub 5 seconds.

EDIT: Also you can pre-define the session resolution on your most common resolution/screen size so the VM doesn't need to perform as much resizing when the session starts. More prevalent in PCoIP.

VDI Engineer VCP-DCV, VCP7-DTM, VCAP7-DTM Design
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dusschotenp
Contributor
Contributor

We having the same issue with VMware Horizon 7.5.1 and Windows 10 (1809) and using BLAST

We not using App volumes

When we reconnect to a session from a other (thin)client we see a black screen for 20-30 sec

When we reconnect to a disconnected session from the same client, we have no issues

Anyone who have fixed this? Thanks!

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vgerg
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Sorry to hijack this thread but...

We're having an issue where we get a black screen for a short time when logging in with the Horizon Desktop Client and I wondered if this is expected behaviour?

When connecting from a Wyse 3040 on latest firmware that has the 5.1 Client we get a black screen from anywhere between 2 and 20 seconds.

Windows 10 1803

Horizon 7.9

2 x Nvidia Grid Tesla M10 card (Latest vib and driver)

Blast protocol

Cheers,

Gerg

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klibo87
Contributor
Contributor

We have the same issue:

- Windows 10 1803

- Horizon 7.9

- Horizon Client 5.0

5-20 sec. black screen to reconnect to virtual desktop.

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RandyBrown
Contributor
Contributor

We have the same issue.

Windows 10 VDI Pool - When reconnecting to the virtual desktop, there is a black screen that takes between 5-20 seconds before it goes away and the user sees the desktop.

We have determined that it directly corresponds to memory usage of the virtual desktop, the higher the memory usage of the virtual desktop, the longer it takes.

For instance…

- When memory usage is at 1.7GB (USED) out of 5GB (TOTAL), the black screen only lasted 2 or 3 seconds before the desktop is displayed.
- When memory usage was 3GB (USED), the black screen lasted 7 or 8 seconds. 
- As we increased usage, the black screen stayed longer.  My last test was memory usage at 4.5 GB (USED) and the black screen stayed for 14 seconds or longer.

We are in the process of working with VMWare Support to determine what can be done to eliminate this issue because it does not happen with our Windows 7 virtual desktop pools.

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RyanChristopher
Contributor
Contributor

Seems we're also having this issue with our Windows 10 VDI pools taking approx. 10 seconds to display the desktop (but have seen upwards to 20 seconds or even longer). Our Windows 7 desktop pools average around 5 seconds. Same Horizon version installed on both (7.9). Both PCoIP and BLAST protocols having the issue (PCoIP does take a tad bit longer however).

We are running 8GB RAM in our Win10 pools currently so not sure if RAM is an issue for us. Perhaps it does come into play in some cases.

Will also note that this is also observed on an initial connection--although we don't "notice" it as much since we're conditioned to wait for a bit longer here.

If we connect/reconnect using RDP it's about 2 seconds.

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