Technical Architects Blog
DNM visit the briforum Conference - Part 2
Session: Ask the experts.
This was one session we were looking forward to. Experts were Brian Madden, Rick Mack, Shawn Bass, Patrick Rouse. It started with a rough overview of what desktop management is and how it had grown over the years. There was a very much a Citrix feel in the room with the odd hug in for App-V. Other concepts of layering were discussed. While the Citrix guys seem to feel there is no product there to do this currently. It started to sound like Citrix hasn’t got there yet but we hope it will.
The elephant in the room came to the front, when a gentleman asked which should I invest my effort in, View or Xendesktop? The answer was more or less it depends. They are both good technologies but there was some rambling that View in using PCoIP had backed the wrong horse. However it was agreed that View was much easier to manage in terms of provisioning desktops and was an excellent LAN solution, but when you implemented it over a WAN UDP struggled. (Read on as we will disprove this theory)
The question was asked which would perform better on a common hypervisor - eg. View and XenDesktop on vSphere, as you can't deploy View on Hyper-v. The answer given by Sean Bass was that the real test was VMware View on vSphere versus Remote-FX on Hyper-V. It wasn't the answer we were looking for but Citrix seemed to be disappearing out of the game. As we knew there was a Protocol session and a Remote-FX session to come we started to understand which sessions were going to be relevant. (Brian Madden was following a similar track)
Session: What does your Enterprise Desktop Look like in 2015
What type of Platforms will evolve? This was presented by VMware. The answer sounded like View in the Cloud. I wouldn't necessary agree with it being as simple as View in the cloud. The cloud is a very generic name soon to become a hybrid cloud, but all for another discussion. I can see a business workspace made up of applications that are presented to me on a platform something like a Google apps platform or perhaps VMware's Spring. Headache approaching for application developers, the requirement will be to build applications that can be delivered on various platforms and can be accessed by various browsers. Will this simplify management of application delivery in the cloud. The key difference these days is that the internet wasn’t available everywhere
Protocol Smackdown Session:
So this is where our trip started to get interesting. There are 3 key differences between VDI solutions, the management, their protocols and their licensing costs. This was what we hoped would confirm which protocol was the winner. Presented by Shawnbass.com, Benny Tritsch.
Initially it spoke about Graphical - User experience, Remoter FX (again!), lossy Compression, client side and host side rendering and compression. These are all natural parameters to be considered when discussing the remote desktop experience.
Using different scenarios this session did a comparison between
• Quest - EOP
• Citrix – HDX
• Microsoft - RDP
• VMware View – PCoIP
The 4 videos were run side by side, demonstrating how different graphical formats experienced using the different protocols
Formats: GDI, GDI+, PDF, Windows Presentation Foundation, there was no real difference on how the user experienced this in either of the 4 examples given.
Silverlight, Flash, WMV, Quicktime, DirectX (D3D) and OpenGL (some with multiple versions). This is where we saw a great difference between the different protocols. VMware View PCoIP and Citrix HDX were clearly the winners.
Other elements such as LAN or WAN with different settings for bandwidth, latency and packet loss were not taken into consideration here. Also 3 of the Protocols(RDP, HDX, EOP) were shown on physical devices and 1 was shown on a virtual device. It is worth noting that although View was the only VDI protocol to be demonstrated on a virtual machine, its performance and user experience was identical for 2g Graphics. The virtual desktop only began to lose performance when 3D graphics were being used in the scenario. It wasn't a true example or bakeoff which was rather frustrating. It would a have been better to show all protocol scenarios running on a virtual machine. This would have given greater weight to their “Bakeoff”. It is also worth noting that there is poor support for Open GL out there.
