5.2

Table Of Contents
With the PCoIP display protocol, if you have an enterprise LAN with 100Mb or a 1Gb switched network, your
end users can expect excellent performance under the following conditions:
n
Two monitors (1920x1080)
n
Heavy use of Microsoft Office applications
n
Heavy use of Flash-embedded Web browsing
n
Frequent use of multimedia with limited use of full screen mode
n
Frequent use of USB-based peripherals
n
Network-based printing
For more information, see the information guide called PCoIP Display Protocol: Information and Scenario-Based
Network Sizing Guide.
Optimization Controls Available with PCoIP
If you use the PCoIP display protocol from VMware, you can adjust several elements that affect bandwidth
usage.
n
You can adjust the size of the image cache on Windows and Linux client systems, from 50MB to 300MB.
Image caching reduces the amount of display data that must be retransmitted.
n
You can configure the image quality level and frame rate used during periods of network congestion. The
quality level setting allows you to limit the initial quality of the changed regions of the display image.
Unchanged regions of the image progressively build to a lossless (perfect) quality. You can adjust the
frame rate from 1 to 120 frames per second.
This control works well for static screen content that does not need to be updated or in situations where
only a portion needs to be refreshed.
n
You can also turn off the build-to-lossless feature altogether if instead of progressively building to perfect
quality (lossless), you choose to build to perceptual lossless.
n
You can control which encryption algorithms are advertised by the PCoIP endpoint during session
negotiation. By default, both Salsa20-256round12 and AES-128-GCM algorithms are available.
n
With regard to session bandwidth, you can configure the maximum bandwidth, in kilobits per second, to
correspond to the type of network connection, such as a 4Mbit/s Internet connection. The bandwidth
includes all imaging, audio, virtual channel, USB, and control PCoIP traffic.
You can also configure a lower limit, in kilobits per second, for the bandwidth that is reserved for the
session, so that a user does not have to wait for bandwidth to become available. You can specify the
Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) size for UDP packets for a PCoIP session, from 500 to 1500 bytes.
n
You can specify the maximum bandwidth that can be used for audio (sound playback) in a PCoIP session.
Network Configuration Example
In a test pod in which one vCenter Server instance managed 5 pools of 2,000 virtual machines in each pool,
each ESXi host had the following hardware and software for networking requirements.
Physical components
for each host
n
Brocade 1860 Fabric Adapter utilizing 10Gig Ethernet and FCoE for
network and storage traffic, respectively.
n
Connection to a Brocade VCS Ethernet fabric consisting of 6 VDX6720-60
switches. The switches uplinked to the rest of the network with two 1GB
connections to a Juniper J6350 router.
vLAN summary
n
One 10Gb vLAN per desktop pool (5 pools)
Chapter 4 Architecture Design Elements and Planning Guidelines
VMware, Inc. 53