Monitoring PCoIP

Morgan,

If PCoIP is based on RDP then it should work, however such scenario has not been tested, therefore it's not officially supported.

Regards,

Wojtek.

Google is fantastic  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCoIP#PCoIP_Protocol

PC-over-IP (PCoIP) is a proprietary remote display protocol developed by Teradici. The protocol is available in hardware silicon and in software. In 2008, VMware licensed Teradici's PCoIP protocol, and supports it in VMware Horizon View.

PCoIP is a UDP based protocol that is host rendered, multi-codec and dynamically adaptive. Images rendered on the server are captured as pixels, compressed and encoded and then sent to the client for decryption and decompression.

So a few pointers:

Proprietary: Means that they will not likely share the internals of the protocol. Negative

UDP: Means noisy with overhead and no delivery assurance and very likely not transaction oriented. Negative

VMware has bought licensing. Positive since it will a bigger use base/case for this protocol to be decoded.

Short version - you will not find much use in monitoring this with DC RUM, more than volume and users.

Just curious to know Morgan - where did you get the piece about "enhancement to RDP", from VMware?

I would say the only things i'm really interested in are:-

Client to Server network performance (Can equally get this with TCP monitoring)
User mapping so we can see utilisation/performance per site (This is the key piece)

In terms of enhancement to RDP; that was from this page: https://nbstec.zendesk.com/entries/21611657-RDP-vs-PCoIP-Desktop-Virtualization-an-insiders-view 

In real terms I suppose the proof is in the pudding as to what we will get; I will attempt to get the project team to test this with one of the servers in the coming weeks.

On your first piece - Client to Server network performance - you won't get that from any network based tool as the protocol is UDP.

The TCP vs UDP discussion is timeless and endless but can be boiled down to:

UDP: Connectionless - No window throttling - No retransmission - No Sequencing - No Acknowledgement

TCP: (just flip the arguments)

UDP is supposed to take the strain off the machine but in reality it just pushes it all up through teh OSI to athe application to do the computation of the validity of the content.

Since it is connectionless and has no sequence numbering - you will not be able to tell if it's effective or correct (retransmissions) or if it's flooding any pipe anywhere (windowing/throttling).

But please keep us updated on your findings since at least I'm very interested in your findings.

Forgot to say that I disagree with https://nbstec.zendesk.com/entries/21611657-RDP-vs-PCoIP-Desktop-Virtualization-an-insiders-view

RDP is also a proprietary protocol and they have nothing to do with each other, (else they wouldn't be proprietary) more than enabling a "thinner" network protocol than what an assumed "fat" client or "chatty" app would require.

I agree with Ulf. I'd expect, that PCoIP utlilizes the Windows Terminal Services infrastructure, but doesn't use the RDP protocol itself.

Hi Morgan,

I have a customer in India interested to know what kind of visibility and insight DC RUM can provide for PCOIP traffic. 

Can you share the results of your tests?

regards,

Praveen