The Tech Journal

Do you have a VMware Horizon View VDI environment and some power users you’d like to optimize? I’ve got some optimizations that you can easily apply via the VMware Horizon GPO (Group Policy Object) bundle.

These are performance optimizations and configurations that I have rolled out for my own persistent desktop to optimize the experience for myself. These optimizations may use more resources to provide a better experience for power users.

Please note that these optimizations are not meant to be deployed for large numbers of users unless you have the resources to handle it. Always test these settings before rolling out in to production.

VMware Horizon GPO Bundle

As part of any VMware Horizon View deployment, you should have installed the VMware Horizon GPO Bundle. This is a collection of ADMX GPO (Group Policy Object) templates that you can upload to your domain controllers and use to configure various aspects of your VMware Horizon deployment.

These GPOs can be used to configure both the server, VDI VMs, VMware Horizon Clients, and various configurables with the protocols (including VMware Blast) being used in your deployment such as VMware BLAST, PCoIP, and RDP.

Below, you’ll find some of my favorite customizations and optimizations that I use in my own environment to enhance my experience.

For more information on the VMware Horizon GPO Bundle, please visit the VMware Horizon Documentation – Using Horizon Group Policy Administrative Template Files.

In this post, I’ll be covering the following:

1. VMware Blast: Framerate
2. VMware Blast: H. 264 Quality
3. VMware Blast: Max Session Bandwidth kbit/s Megapixel Slope
4. VMware Horizon Client Configuration: Allow display scaling
5. VMware Horizon Client Configuration/View USB Configuration: Allow keyboard and Mouse (HID) Devices
6. VMware View Agent Configuration/View RTAV Configuration/View RTAV Webcam Settings
7. VMware View Agent Configuration/VMware HTML5 Features/Enable VMware HTML5 Features
8. VMware View Agent Configuration/VMware HTML5 Features/VMware HTML5 Multimedia Redirection
9. VMware View Agent Configuration/VMware HTML5 Features/VMware WebRTC Redirection Features

Let’s begin!

VMware Blast: Framerate

Do you have a GPU for your VDI session and extra bandwidth? If so, let’s crank that framerate up for a smoother experience! Configuring this variable will increase the default framerate to 60 fps (frames per second).

Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> VMware Blast -> Max Frame Rate

Let’s set this to “Enabled” and set it to 60.

VMware Blast: H. 264 Quality

If you have a GPU to offload H. 264 and the available bandwidth, you can change this setting to reduce the

Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> VMware Blast -> H. 264 Quality

There are two values for this setting, “H. 264 Maximum QP” and “H. 264 Minimum QP”. These control how much processing and compression is used on the VMware Blast h. 264 session.

To increase the quality (and bandwidth usage) of the session, you can decrease these to reduce the amount of compression. In my case I reduced both by “5” from their default values which made a big change.

VMware Blast: Max Session Bandwidth kbit/s Megapixel Slope

This setting will increase the amount of available bandwidth for the Horizon Blast h.264 video stream.

Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> VMware Blast -> Max Session Bandwidth kbit/s Megapixel Slope

The default is “6200” and I recommend playing with this a little to find out what suits you best depending on the other changes you made, especially with the 2 items above.

You can try doubling, tripling, or quadrupling this value depending on what’s required and how much available bandwidth you have.

VMware Horizon Client Configuration: Allow display scaling

Users are usually connecting from all sorts of devices, including laptops, tablets, and more. When connecting to a VDI session with a laptop or tablet that is using display scaling because it has a high native resolution, it may be extremely difficult to read any text because scaling is disabled on the VDI session.

To allow display scaling in the VDI session, we need to enable it via GPO on both the “Computer Configuration” and “User Configuration”.

Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> VMware Horizon Client Configuration -> Allow display scaling

And we’ll set “Allow Display Scaling” to “Enabled”.

User Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> VMware Horizon Client Configuration -> Allow display scaling

And we’ll also set that “Allow Display Scaling” to “Enabled”.

Configuring this will allow you to configure display scaling on the VMware Horizon View client. After enabling this, it automatically configures scaling to match what I have configured on my connecting workstation (such as my Microsoft Surface Tablet, or my Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop). You also have the ability to manually configure the scaling on the session.

VMware Horizon Client Configuration/View USB Configuration: Allow keyboard and Mouse Devices

While you never want to use USB Redirection for keyboards and mice, you may need to use USB redirection for various HID (Human Interface Devices) that appear as keyboards or mice. You may need to enable this to make the following devices work:

• 2FA/MFA Security Tokens
• Security Keys
• One Touch Tokens

In my case, I had a Yubico Yubikey security key that I needed passed through using USB Redirection (more on that here) to authenticate 2FA sessions inside of my VDI session.

To enable the passthrough of keyboards and mice (HID) devices, change the following.

Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> VMware Horizon Client Configuration -> View USB Configuration -> Allow keyboard and Mouse Devices

We’re going to go ahead and set “Allow keyboard and Mouse Devices” to “Enabled”.

VMware View Agent Configuration/View RTAV Configuration/View RTAV Webcam Settings

Using a webcam with VMware Horizon and RTAV (Real Time Audio Video), you may notice a slow frame rate and low resolution on your webcam going through the VDI session.

Here, we’re going to increase the fps (frames per second) and resolution of RTAV for VMware Horizon.

Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> VMware View Agent Configuration -> View RTAV Configuration -> View RTAV Webcam Settings

We’re going to “Enable” the following and set the values below:

Max frames per second = 25
Resolution - Default image resolution height in pixels = 600
Resolution - Default image resolution width in pixels = 800
Resolution - Max image height in pixels = 720
Resolution - Max image width in pixels = 1280

You’ll now notice a clearer and higher resolution webcam running at a faster framerate.

VMware View Agent Configuration/VMware HTML5 Features/Enable VMware HTML5 Features

There’s numerous HTML5 optimizations that VMware has incorporated in to the latest versions of VMware Horizon View. These include, but are not limited to:

• HTML5 Multimedia Redirection
• Geolocation Redirection
• Browser Redirection
• Media Optimization for Microsoft Teams

We want all this good stuff, so we’ll head over to the following:

Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> VMware View Agent Configuration -> VMware HTML5 Features -> Enable VMware HTML5 Features

We’ll set “Enable VMware HTML5 Features” to “Enabled”.

I highly recommend reading up and briefing yourself on HTML5 Multimedia Redirection, along with over Remote Desktop Features over on the VMware Horizon 2013 Documentation – Configurating Remote Desktop Features.

VMware View Agent Configuration/VMware HTML5 Features/VMware HTML5 Multimedia Redirection

So there’s this little thing called “HTML5 Multimedia Redirection”, where when configured and the plugins are installed, VMware Horizon will essentially redirect HTML5 based multimedia from the VDI session to your local system to handle.

This offload makes video extremely crisp and smooth, however comes with some concerns, security risks, and learning on your part. When you enable this, you only want to do so for trusted websites.

Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> VMware View Agent Configuration -> VMware HTML5 Features -> VMware HTML5 Multimedia Redirection

In this location, we need to set “Enable VMware HTML5 Multimedia Redirection” to “Enabled”. After this, we need to configure the URL list for domains and websites that we will allow HTML5 Multimedia Redirection to work with.

To do this, we’ll set “Enable URL list for VMware HTML5 Multimedia Redirection” to “Enabled”, and then add YouTube to the exception list to allow HTML5 Multimedia Redirection for YouTube. In the URL list, we will add:

https://www.youtube.com/*

And that’s it!

VMware View Agent Configuration/VMware HTML5 Features/VMware WebRTC Redirection Features

We’re all using Microsoft Teams these days, and while Microsoft Teams does have VDI optimization, you need to enable what’s needed on the VMware Horizon side of things to make it work.

To do this, head over to:

Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> VMware View Agent Configuration -> VMware HTML5 Features -> VMware WebRTC Redirection Features

We’ll set “Enable Media Optimization for Microsoft Teams” to “Enabled”.

In order for Microsoft Teams VDI optimization to function, there are steps involved with the installation which aren’t covered in this post. For these steps, make sure you check out my guide on Microsoft Teams VDI Optimization for VMware Horizon.

Conclusion

Leave a comment and let me know if these helped you, or if you have any optimizations or tweaks you’d like to share with the community!

In this post I’m going to explain what VDI is in the most simplest form and how you can benefit from using virtual desktop infrastructure (virtualized desktops) in your EUC strategy.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

VDI standards for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Think of your existing physical desktop infrastructure (your desktop computers, also called end user computing), now virtualize those desktop computers in a virtual environment much like your servers are, and you now have Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

End User Computing (EUC)

Traditionally end user computing has been delivered by means of deploying physical (real) computers to each user in your office (and possibly remote users). This brings with it the cost of the systems, the time/cost to maintain the systems and hardware, and the management overhead of maintaining those systems.

By utilizing VDI, you can significantly reduce the cost, management, and maintenance required to maintain your EUC infrastructure.

What is VDI

When you implement a VDI solution, you virtualize your desktops and workstations on a virtualization server, much like your servers are probably already virtualized. Users will connect via software, a thin client, or a zero client to establish the session to transmit and receive the video, monitor, and keyboard of workstation that is virtualized.

This might sound familiar, like RDS (Remote Desktop Services). However, in an RDS environment numerous users share the same server and resources and access it un a multi-user fashion, whereas with VDI they are using a virtualized Windows instance dedicated to them running an OS like Windows 10.

How does VDI work

Using the software, thin client, or zero client, a user establishes a session to a connection broker, which then passes it along to the Virtual Machine running on the server. The Virtual Machine encodes and compresses the graphics and then connects the users keyboard and mouse to the VM.

What’s even cooler, is that remote devices like printers and USB devices can also be forwarded on to the VM, giving the user the feeling that the computer that’s running on the server, is actually right in front of them.

And if that isn’t cool enough, in an environment where 3D accelerated and high-performance graphics are required, you can use special graphics cards and GPUs to provide those high end graphics remotely to users. Technically you could game, do engineering work, video and graphics editing, and more.

Why use VDI

So your desktops are now virtualized. This means you no longer need to maintain numerous physical PCs and the hardware that is inside of them.

You can deploy a standardized golden image that instantly clones as users log in to give them a pre-configured and maintained environment. This means you manage 1 or few desktops which can get deployed to hundreds of users, instead of managed hundreds of desktops.

If a thin client or zero client fails you can simply re-deploy a new unit to the user, which are very inexpensive, and reduces downtime.

In the event of a disaster, your VDI EUC environment would be integrated in to your disaster recovery solution, meaning it would be very easy to get users back up and running.

One of the best parts is that the environment can be used inside of your office and externally, allowing you to provide a smooth experience for remote users. This made business continuity a breeze for organizations that need to deploy remote users or “Work from home” users on the fly.

The cost of VDI

The cost to roll out a VDI solution varies depending on the number of users, types of users, and functionality you’d like.

Typically, VDI is a no-brainer for large organizations and enterprises due to the cost savings on hardware, management, and maintaining the solution vs traditional desktops. But smaller organizations can also benefit from VDI, examples being organizations that use expensive desktops and/or laptops for uses such as engineering, software development, and other uses that require high-cost workstations.

One last thought I want to leave you with; imagine an environment with 50-100 systems, and all the wasted power and CPU cycles when users are just browsing the internet. In a virtual environment you can over-allocate resources, which means you can identify user trends and only purchase the hardware you need to based on observed workloads. This can significantly reduce the cost of hardware, especially for software development, engineering, and other high performance computing.

For more information on VDI, take a look at my other VDI related blog posts.