PCoIP Revisited

We've had a lot more time over the last few weeks to spend working with PCoIP.  I've concluded it's still not quite ready for prime time, but it sure is close.  When you get it dialed in properly, it's a pretty amazing desktop experience.  As I write this, I'm working from a Teradici zero-client on a 12/2 meg Internet connection.  I'm connecting via an IPSec tunnel to our infrastructure which is on a 1 gigabit Internet connection provided by Internap.

I've got dual 1920x1200 screens set up, and I've got content playing on both screens.  For most things, the fact I'm not working on a local PC is indistinguishable.  Video is a tad choppy, but totally watchable.

A few issues remain however:

  1. PCoIP MUST be able to traverse the VMware View Secure Gateway.  IPSec tunnels are not an option from every site we support.
  2. View needs to be vastly more intelligent about how it routes connections between the clients and the virtual desktops.  If I leave a VPN connection open from my virtual desktop and try to connect with a PCoIP zero client, View tells my zero-client that the IP it should connect to is the IP of my RAS adaptor (the VPN IP), not the IP of the adaptor on the same subnet as View.

There are a great many tweaks to make to your virtual desktop to achieve optimal performance as well (for example, make sure your mouse pointer scheme is set to "system default") which I will document in a further post.