ClearCube White Paper Best Practices Pairing Virtualization and Collaboration

Transcription

1 ClearCube White Paper Best Practices Pairing Virtualization and Collaboration Increasing VDI Audio/Video Performance for the Defense Connect Online User Community

2 Introduction In Quarter 4, 2011, significant to VDI implementation possibilities for the DCO community of users, the ability to use VMware-based zero clients as a more capable alternative to Citrixbased thin clients will be enabled for the first time in connecting to DCO Connect services. For the first time VMware View based virtualized desktop platforms that perform well will exist and be supported. VMware View official support is significant to the DCO user community because it gives the best available VDI solution based on the superior stateless device advantages of zero clients for use with DCO Connect. Those desktop advantages include extremely low power consumption, fan-less/noiseless operation, no resident operating system, memory or storage, and elimination of software patch management at the desktop. In addition, VMware with ClearCube offers DCO users a new hybrid VDI capability that can serve as an investment protection safety net for VMware adoption with high performance collaboration use cases. Like an insurance policy, this capability exists ready to be used when required. It will be reassuring to VMware View adopters that the capability can be applied to the collaboration equation at any time to overcome performance slowdowns caused by overutilized shared resources. Purpose Statement The purpose of this white paper is to inform the DCO Connect community of the potential for using hybrid VDI architecture for VMware virtualization use cases that need collaboration performance on par with standalone PCs. If you accept the following technical premises to be valid, then this white paper on how to achieve the best DCO Connect performance in a virtualized environment using zero clients will make sense to you: 1. Dedicated processing resources will perform better than shared processing resources 2. Software aided by specifically designed optimization hardware will perform better than software alone Benefits of Dedicated Processing Resources There are numerous blog and internet support postings that document problems using thin clients in virtualized collaboration environments. The phenomenal hardware reduction

3 efficiencies offered by virtualization also introduce performance challenges into the equation specific to DCO Connect collaboration sessions. Virtual servers are shared devices that must schedule their resources to service requests. This means that the response is dependent upon elements that fluctuate and are not steady-state reliable. Therefore, multiple virtual desktop users all compete for resources that need to be scheduled. The larger the community of users, the higher the level of competition for limited resources. In a DCO application, those resource requests are enormous, involving audio streams and video streams over potentially constricted bandwidth connections, so the end result is that the end user experience or the responsiveness of the application (in this case DCO Connect) that the user is trying to use can degrade as the participant numbers scale upward. Historically, thin client solutions have suffered with rich media. Recently they have gotten better but in ingest only mode (i.e. steaming video). When it comes to bi-directional rich media which is latency intolerant, performance problems become readily apparent. Even though thin clients have processors, memories, and graphics chips with scaled down computing capabilities, the performance bottleneck is the audio and video packet traffic that is transmitted by the virtual server to the thin clients via TCP that consumes network bandwidth. The collaboration performance issue is mitigated when participants use standalone fat client PCs. Standalone PCs are dedicated processing resources. Dedicated processing resources outperform shared processing resources. Logically, that is easy to explain and justify, even to a non-technical audience. Most people understand that when one person is using a resource, whether it is a printer or a processor, that person gets 100 per cent performance return on that resource. Share the resource between two, three, twenty, or fifty people and the return on that resource can only diminish. In the case of shared printers, and processors for that matter, people have to wait longer for the result than if they did not have to share whether it is waiting for a printed page to queue up or for a delayed screen response. It s a fact of life. Elements such as local processing, dedicated graphics processors, and purpose-built CODECs, taken for granted under distributed processing environments using standalone networked PCs, are removed from the equation when using thin-clients replaced by issues and concerns involving bandwidth constraints, protocol efficiencies, and resource sharing metrics. Connection Brokering Flexibility Coupled with PCoIP Performance VMware s entry into the DCO Connect community brings a new capability to utilize in addressing the performance issues. That new capability leverages their unique desktop client View. View has the ability to broker connections to designated resources. Typically that resource is a server in the cloud, but in the case of DCO Connect collaboration sessions that

4 resource can be a dedicated computer. Multiple users can be brokered to multiple computers to form a collaboration connection cluster. At the core of VMware is the PCoIP protocol. Understanding how this highly efficient protocol factors into the performance equation will be critical to understanding how the solution can be best architected. PCoIP is UDP based rather than TCP based. TCP is highly reliable but what makes it so is that it re-tries to send dropped Ethernet packets. This is very important with data (dropping a few zeros will cause heart attacks if you are a bank manager). But DCO Connect is sound and video based (as is a collaboration environment), so TCP protocols do not add value and just slow everything down by re-transmitting packets. UDP does not perform re-tries so it is not as reliable but no one cares if it is unreliable because your mind does not perceive the small number of dropped frames and packets. But not having to perform transmission re-tries means UDP is much faster. And fast is what is needed to create a satisfactory user experience. PCoIP is optimized for bi-directional audio/video. The PCoIP algorithm gives audio a higher priority than video, so sound fidelity gets treated better than video. You can see past slow video frame rates and your mind will fill the gaps, but if you do not hear anything your mind is not as forgiving. Therefore audio gets precedence.

5 Hybrid VDI Satisfies Power Users (1:1) To summarize, PCoIP s underlying core code is native to VMware and is as good as it gets in efficient transmissions across the network. In the vast majority of cases, using VMware best practices for DCO Connect will deliver great collaboration performance. But if a use case emerges that requires the equivalent of standalone PC performance, VMware, as previously stated, has a unique View client with brokering capability that ClearCube Technology, Austin, Texas, has put to good use to add a boost using zero clients in virtualization environments. ClearCube calls it Hybrid VDI architecture. ClearCube s flagship hybrid VDI architecture is designed to satisfy network administrators requirements to centralize computing resources yet still deliver high performance over distance using zero client desktops. Zero clients are stateless with no local memory, storage, or operating system so they are highly rated for their security. Additional benefits include extremely low power consumption (15W), small footprint, and noiseless operation. In Hybrid VDI architectures, VMware View may broker the zero client connection on a 1:1 basis to a dedicated computer to run 3D and other robust applications such as Google Earth, ArcGIS, ESRI Suite, and FalconView that power users may require. View also allows the zero client to connect to virtual machines (VMs) running on networked servers. Because power users have demanding processing requirements, the ratio of use is heavily skewed toward 1:1 connection typically, with occasional access to run programs as virtual machines. The 80:20 ratio rule typically applies as the rule of thumb. ClearCube Collaboration Connection Cluster (4Cs) Applying this core concept to DCO Connect, the hybrid VDI solution ClearCube has created is ClearCube Collaboration Connection Cluster (4Cs). In this instance, the usage ratio is reversed so that virtual machine access is typical, with occasional access to run programs, such as DCO Connect and other rich media applications, on 1:1 systems. The 20:80 ratio rule applies. By accessing 4Cs, users that want robust performance in DCO collaboration sessions utilize their zero client desktop devices to route to blade PCs that are made available on their network. A blade PC is a high density fat client workstation that delivers the same high level performance profile as the standalone fat client PC performance that DCO users are happy with except for the fact that the standalone PC is not virtualized. What sets the ClearCube blade PC apart from the standalone PC is that the blade PC contains a PCoIP hardware compression adapter closely coupled to a dedicated graphics processor unit (GPU) per user that is specially designed to deliver optimized performance over the connection.

6 By using 4Cs, the best of both worlds high performance VDI -- is now possible. Each virtual desktop user for the duration of the collaboration session has a dedicated 1:1 relationship with the blade PC. For that period of time that the collaboration session is run, each user has his own dedicated PC to use. Dedicated resources do not need to be scheduled and there is no competition for resource allocation. The zero client may be running a VDI session for Microsoft Office applications, for instance, 80% of the time. But when bi-directional audio/video/screen sharing is needed, View can route the user s connection to a blade PC in the 4Cs collaboration connection cluster. More importantly, as compared with PCoIP s software presence in VMware, 4Cs utilizes PCoIP hardware based CODECs that are located in the zero clients and on the PC blade host compression adapters. Hardware based CODECs combined with a dedicated GPU per collaboration participant deliver far superior performance over software based CODECs because there are dedicated high performance purpose-built chips per user that are devoted to running the I/O instruction sets. Rather than having to schedule demanding I/O requests through a shared server resource, a collaboration connection cluster can be used to provide dedicated I/O processing for each user for the duration of the collaboration session. Blade PCs in the Cluster = Seats at the Table in the Virtual Conference Center View allows the participants to route themselves to the collaboration session by brokering the connection to the designated DCO Connect collaboration cluster. The network administrator sets up a list of pooled resources that are accessible by the DCO Connect user community. Each View user has a window with a drop down list of available resources. As blades become allocated, they drop off the list and are no longer available. If the blade PCs are all in use, DCO Connect users can still collaborate, but their performance profile is reduced because they are operating in virtualized software mode without dedicated hardware assistance. However, because only concurrent users access the collaboration connection cluster, only a small number of PCoIP hardware optimized blade PCs need to be configured as high speed collaboration delivery engines. Like a physical meeting room with a set number of seats, you would only size the virtual seats in the collaboration cluster for the maximum number of concurrent participants. Scalability is easy to implement. Just add blade PCs if the maximum number of concurrent users increases.

7 In the 4Cs collaboration sessions, establishing separate login and logout sessions are the most basic way to launch applications, but the user experience is made more seamless by enabling roaming profiles in Microsoft Active Directory profile or VMware View Persona Management. With this approach, user profiles are preserved and dynamically synchronized with a remote profile repository. The benefit is that it does not matter if a user logs into a VM or a blade because his data off the network share follows him to the login location. Thus, user profiles containing user data such as MY Documents files, user desktop settings such as for desktop appearance, and application-specific data and settings appear on the 4Cs blade PCs just as they would have on the VMs. To optimize response time so that audio and video have reduced latencies, these collaboration connection clusters can be set up within the DCO host server farm network. Running the collaboration clusters on a local area network closest to the user locations steps up performance one more notch. This way distance to the collaboration sites is lessened and network latencies are reduced.

8 Summary In summary, as the DCO Connect user community recognizes the benefits provided by VMware platforms, and as the DCO Connect community and the VMware View community becomes more tightly coupled in the upcoming months, there will be a growing demand to establish scalable collaboration with the best possible performance profiles. ClearCube Collaboration Connection Cluster (4Cs) provides VMware users an additional VDI investment protection safety net that can be added to the network for special high performance use cases. As rich media applications proliferate, this type of 4Cs investment is worthwhile not just for DCO Connect but for others and many more to come. ClearCube Technology encourages government agencies to contact ClearCube or Carahsoft to request an assessment. ClearCube solution architects can help you determine the optimal configuration to meet your requirements. For more information, please contact: Jim Zakzeski Vice President, Business Development and Marketing ClearCube Technology James.Zakzeski@clearcube.com Q1 2012