I spent the day at VMware PEX in the End User Computing (EUC) boot camp trying to fast track some VMware View know-how into the Dell TechCenter lab. Below are a few of the key points that I can share.

PC over IP (PCoIP) is a real-time protocol.

  1. The main trade-off is less bandwidth utilization versus overall user experience.
  2. By default, View 5 is built to lossless, meaning that it builds from low compression to a pixel perfect image.
  3. PCoIP takes available network bandwidth while adapting to the network conditions.
  4. It began as a hardware to hardware solution stack but has evolved to a software to software solution stack as of View 4.0.

Key PCoIP tuning parameters are: (1) frame rate and (2) max initial image quality. 

  1. Dropping max initial image quality from 90 to 70 can reduce bandwidth by 30%.
  2. Image fidelity can be had by reducing the frame rate in order to keep higher resolution.

ThinApp Manifesto includes:

  1. Knowing the application that you're trying to package as software-as-a-service (SaaS). Application assessments are vital for deployment success.
  2. Listening to customer pain points.
  3. Understanding that disk reads are critical to performance and quality of service.

Horizon is the management platform for EUC.

PCoIP Log Viewer by VMware's Chuck Hirstius is comprised of two components, a front-end parser for converting PCoIP server log files into XML, and a Viewer GUI for graphing the resulting files and performing real-time monitoring of PCoIP WMI statistics. For more information, go to Chuck's blog.