Enhance Users Virtual Desktop Experience with Wyse TCX Multimedia
Until recently, a lot of us were familiar with Wyse devices, but only as dumb terminals attach to a mainframe system. I have used Wyse terminal in the past and thought that is where they would stay, until about three years ago. Within the last 2-3, three years the Wyse devices have made comeback with enhance capability that will benefit both standard and power users in your organisation. Under the term – thin computing and VDI ready. Wyse have managed to rebrand themselves and re-engineered their thin computing product offerings to take advantage of the now popular virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
Depending on your environment and your approach to desktop support there is a range of thin client to choose from. There is Windows XPe, Linux and their own in house Wyse OS. Personally, I prefer the Wyse OS clients; the support for the hardware is almost nil; there is n need to worry about Windows update or learning Linux. Any major fault is as simple as swapping out the device.
To further enhance the added physical power to their Wyse V90 and V10L they have introduced the Wyse TCX Multimedia. It is design to enhance the user’s multimedia experience. Therefore, if you are thinking of implementing a VDI solution and is worried that your power users will loose the performance advantage they currently have on their physical PC, with Wyse TCX Multimedia they might not.
The “Wyse TCX Multimedia software intelligently manages multimedia processing tasks dynamically between the client and server. The multimedia stream decodes on the client using the local processing power of the device. This reduces the server load as well as the network bandwidth. Wyse TCX Multimedia software supports multi-cast delivery and can stream media directly from a network-based media server, eliminating multimedia overhead from the server VM.”
Based on their researched Wyse have seen improvement in four areas:
1. Server Capacity
In this test, the Wyse team played a typical WMV file (Amazon-2.wmv) on a series of clients; each connected to a server virtual machine over RDP and measured the total number of users supported on this configuration, and the percent of server utilization. Without Wyse TCX Multimedia, 15 VMs playing the media file drove server CPU utilization up to 97%. With Wyse TCX Multimedia, server scalability improved up to 800%, with 65 VMs playing the media file and still only consuming 86% of CPU.
2. Client CPU
In tests without Wyse TCX Multimedia, client CPU utilization during
Multimedia playback was at 90%; and the user experience was characterized by low video quality (visible painting, frame drops, and audio out of sync). With Wyse TCX Multimedia, client CPU utilization dropped to 60%, for a 33% reduction in CPU usage and power consumption. Playing the clip consumed just 2Mb/s network bandwidth—the native bit rate of the file. The user experience was the same as on a PC displaying a local file—with no frame drops or other quality problems.
3. Network Bandwidth
Without Wyse TCX Multimedia, 15 VMs playing the multimedia file consumed 258Mb/s of network bandwidth, but with Wyse TCX Multimedia enabled, that same configuration consumed less than 50Mb/s, and 65 VMs only consumed 165Mb/s of network bandwidth for a 677% improvement in bandwidth utilization.
4. Server Capacity
In this test, the Wyse team played a typical WMV file (Amazon-2.wmv) on a series of clients; each connected to a server virtual machine over RDP and measured the total number of users supported on this configuration, and the percent of server utilization. Without Wyse TCX Multimedia, 15 VMs playing the media file drove server CPU utilization up to 97%. With Wyse TCX Multimedia, server scalability improved up to 800%, with 65 VMs playing the media file and still only consuming 86% of CPU.
Source: handling multimedia under desktop virtualization for knowledge workers
