End user experience using VMware View (PCoIP)

Warren Ponder Sr. Product Manager Remote Display Experience presented the session: “View: Remote Desktop Experience”.

This session was all about display performance , thus protocols. For some time now VMware and Teradici are working together on PCoIP, a protocol that Teradici developed and uses in it’s hardware solutions.

VMware is developing a software version of the PCoIP protocol which gives a boost to the end user experience. In de keynote last Wednesday there was a demo of it that I captured for you to see.

Some questions that were addressed in the breakout session.
Q. Will VOIP be supported in the software version?
A. VOIP will be supported, not in the initial release though but in future releases,the hardware version already supports VOIP as we speak.

Q. Will Linux be supported by the protocol?
A. Linux clients will also be supported in PCoIP same as win32 and win64. Multimedia redirection will also be part of the solution, as is bidirectional USB support.

Q. How does PCoIP adresses traversing firewalls?
A. So what about PCoIP addressing traversing firewalls, the protocol itself supports AES encryption which is turned on by default. An administrator can turn it on and off by the way. The hardware implementation uses AES same as the software implementation, but also supports IPsec. Looking at VPN and firewall aspects, for the software implementation of PCoIP VPN clients are supported. VMware is also looking at ssl-vpn connections and to integrate this more. Is it able to use only 443, Teradici hardware uses different ports and they have be opened accordingly.

Q. What about specific ports is opening 443 enough or are there other ports used?
A. From the firewall to the backend you have to have the different firewall ports open, from the client to the firewall that’s not necesary.

Q. Regarding the software client, will that be the standard view client or will that be a different add-on?
A. The software will be integrated with the view client. In order to easy distribute protocol updates, an update mechanism will come available. This mechanism will behave like in the VMware tools, in order to update just the protocol instead of deploying a full view client.