![]() In addition, they don’t really need to log off closing the remote desktop window is enough. Whenever I logged on, my WorkSpace was available almost instantly. Printing is not supported in the WorkSpaces limited preview, but this functionality will be added later.Ī nice feature of running a desktop in the cloud is that the machine is always on-that is, shutdown and reboot do exactly the same thing. However, this feature requires better bandwidth than the one I had in my test. Thus, you can easily transfer all kinds of files between the local and the remote machines. The nice thing is that PCoIP automatically maps local drives on the remote desktop, including USB drives. Users might want to copy and paste between the local and the remote desktops, they want to access USB drives, and some users even still insist on carving information into dead wood.Ĭopy and paste worked fine with text, including formatting however, images from documents can’t be transferred this way between the local and the remote desktops. USB, copy and paste, and printingĪside from the snappiness of the user interface, a few other things have to be considered when it comes to user experience. And PCoIP in Amazon’s cloud is different from PCoIP in a VMware environment. I just mention it to make it clear that you can’t just launch an EC2 Windows server to find out how the user experience would be with WorkSpaces. The WorkSpaces desktop with PCoIP felt much snappier than did the Window server with RDP. RDP appears to be less forgiving than PCoIP with high latencies, but it performs better at low connection speeds. RDP started choking after a few frames even though the video quality was set to only 360p. Make sure to allow ICMP in the EC2 security group (firewall).īy the way, I tried to watch the same video on an EC2 Windows server in the same availability zone without success. You can run a preliminary test before signing up for WorkSpaces by launching an EC2 instance in the same availability zone and then pinging the server from your network or wherever you plan to offer virtual desktops. Thus, you should be able to find an availability zone close enough with a latency below 100ms. I guess it won’t take long before Amazon offers WorkSpaces in all their datacenters around the world. I think, with latencies below 100ms, your users probably won’t notice the difference from a physical desktop. ![]() I could still notice a difference from using a direct connection through HTTP, though. Even HD videos worked fine as long as I didn’t watch the video in full-screen mode. This is why I was quite surprised that I could watch a YouTube video across continents, with a relatively slow Internet connection and on a remote desktop in Amazon’s cloud, using Teradici’s PCoIP protocol. (Notice: I didn't work with Citrix latest protocols (HDX and HDX-3D)). After some years, I gave up and just accepted that application and desktop sharing protocols are simply not suitable for transferring video and sound. And, every time, I was disappointed again (I had a few more disappointments with Citrix along the way, which I will discuss in a later post). With every new version (and name) of their product, Citrix promised improvement with regard to multimedia applications. Nevertheless, it was essentially impossible to watch these videos on the WinFrame server through the Citrix ICA protocol. Encarta’s videos had the size of thumbnails and were of poor quality. ![]() A few days later, I installed Microsoft Encarta (a multimedia encyclopedia that is no longer available) and launched a video. At first, I was very excited about the new technology and was wondering if we could replace our PCs with it. It was on a Citrix WinFrame server based on Windows 3.51. I still remember when I was first confronted with the virtual desktop concept almost 20 years ago. However, with a latency of 300ms, things got a bit choppy. What surprised me was that, with my poor connection, watching YouTube videos was still perfectly possible. With a latency of 200ms, work was still convenient, although the user experience when typing longer text was suboptimal. ![]()
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