vmware view 6.1 teradici pcoip firmware 4.6.1

Buffers were not being overflowed and networking gear did not show packet loss at all. The network team insisted that their network had never lost a packet, and indeed the network was sound. I started with interviewing the network team to understand the topology and configuration. Higher levels of packet loss can exhibit the behavior experienced by the users.

Teradici, the makers of the PC-over-IP Protocol (PCOIP), recommends that packet loss within a single PCoIP protocol session should target less than 0.1%. Knowing that high packet loss has been an ongoing condition, I started my investigation with the network. Armed with this basic information and admin level access to vSphere and View I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. The only major thing that either of the tools showed was major PCoIP packet loss (upwards of 30% much of the time, with spikes much higher) and high PCoIP latency (even on the LAN with sub-1ms latency). The customer had also implemented VMware vCenter Operations (vCOps) for View and Xangati’s VDI Dashboard to help identify the root cause of the problems. Their vSphere environment was well designed, network was highly redundant and the storage backing View had recently been upgraded to an all-flash array to try to resolve the slowness observed by VDI users. The customer had done a lot of things right – starting with choosing VMware View and pushing a virtual desktop solution to a variety of use cases across the organization. The customer asked for a 24 hour turn-around on identifying and fixing the problems in the environment, so I had my work cut out for me. Without a resolution and increasingly frustrated users, the local VMware account team recommended that ClearPath be engaged to perform a rapid, yet comprehensive health check and analytic troubleshooting service on the View environment, as well as the related storage, network, and vSphere components. The customer had done some troubleshooting, worked with VMware Support and the their local account team but the problems persisted.

The problems occurred with local and remote users (both WAN and LAN could be involved). When users weren’t being randomly disconnected from their desktops, the users experienced lag when dragging windows between multiple monitors, ‘choppy’ graphics/video, and slow application launching. The organization was struggling with constant disconnects and generally poor performance on their View desktops. Several months ago I was called into a new customer to diagnose some odd behavior in their VMware View environment.

Vmware view 6.1 teradici pcoip firmware 4.6.1