PCoIP Session Planning Guide¶

This guide provides capacity planning, optimization, and troubleshooting information for system administrators preparing networks for PCoIP traffic or preparing workloads for remote access using the PCoIP protocol. It acts as a troubleshooting and network planning guide.

In this guide, you will learn about:

• Network Requirements
• Planning your Network Capacity
• PCoIP Session Variables
• Sample Network and Bandwidth Settings
• Evaluating Workload Performance

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About the PCoIP Protocol¶

PCoIP is a display protocol that encodes a complete desktop or workload, which is then displayed through a PCoIP client device over a standard IP network. PCoIP technology uses advanced display compression to provide end users with cloud-based virtual computers such as GPU-enabled virtual workstations or standard virtual desktops as a progressive alternative to a local deployment model. It also supports many of the services available to physical machines, including keyboard, mouse, USB, multiple monitors, printers, audio devices, as well as custom options.

The core technology comprises the PCoIP protocol which compresses, encrypts, and transmits only pixels to a broad range of software clients, mobile clients, and stateless PCoIP Zero Clients, providing a highly secure data exchange.

The image is rendered on the host to provide the framework in which the host can transmit only the pixels across the network without being concerned about the applications or responses from the client. In best case scenarios, zero clients are used to receive the pixels and decode them, essentially eliminating display latency. The PCoIP protocol is configured to enable the display representation rendered by the virtual workstation to be exactly reproduced at the endpoint. This is referred to as lossless reproduction. This is critical, particularly in instances such as medical diagnostics, geospatial analysis, and media production, where the image itself contains important visual information. PCoIP protocol uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) which is much better suited for streaming media and in high-intensive graphic situations.

The PCoIP protocol incorporates the following features:

• It uses UDP packets similar to other real-time protocols, such as VoIP and video conferencing.
• It is inherently reliable and applies intelligence to lost packet re-transmission based on the information type, for example, the PCoIP protocol guarantees the delivery of all USB information irrespective of network packet loss whereas the protocol is selective with compressed audio or pixels to avoid out-of-date re-transmission. PCoIP offers dramatic user experience advantages over traditional methods such as TCP, especially on high latency networks.
• The PCoIP protocol has a dramatic performance advantage over protocols such as TCP on high latency networks as data lost on the network does not need to be re-transmitted.
• It performs traffic shaping on the PCoIP traffic streams and will dynamically adapt image or audio quality depending on the available network resources.
• It fairly shares the available network resources with other PCoIP sessions on the network.
• It has WAN optimizations already built into the protocol.

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Who Uses PCoIP Technology?¶

PCoIP technology is used in a wide range of industries, including government, education, financial services, healthcare, oil and gas, automotive, media and entertainment, architecture, engineering and construction, manufacturing, and design. For information on specific industry applications, check out the case studies featured on our website.

About PCoIP Session Planning¶

The PCoIP protocol provides a real-time delivery of a rich user desktop experience in virtual desktop and remote workstation environments. To ensure a responsive desktop, the PCoIP protocol must be deployed across a properly architected virtual desktop network infrastructure.

The information and data in this guide will help you best work with your infrastructure's requirements, such as for bandwidth, quality of service, latency, jitter, and packet loss.