Chris WolfThis post is the fourth in my series “PCoIP vs. ICA/HDX: A Simple Experiment.”
Last Wednesday I flew from Copenhagen to Stockholm, and then drove with my Gartner colleagues to a hotel in Gavle, Sweden, which was close to where we would meet a client the next day. I didn’t have much time to work with my virtual desktops while at VMworld Europe; that was mainly due to the fact that Internet connectivity was not working at my hotel.
Last Tuesday I used my VMware View client while listening to the conference keynote. During the keynote, I used TweetDeck in my View virtual desktop to tweet my thoughts. The conference Internet connectivity was surprisingly solid; I only had 117 ms latency back to my office lab. VMware View and the PCoIP protocol performed extremely well. At one point during the keynote, I opened this video on my View desktop. The video played without missing a beat. Alessandro Perilli was seated next to me and he too was impressed by the results.
Fresh off a solid performance at VMworld, I was excited to compare VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop from my hotel in Gavle. The hotel’s internet connectivity was reliable, but slow. I measured 208 ms latency and 265 Kbps bandwidth to my office lab.
The VMware View desktop connected without a problem and performance when adding a comment to a Word doc was OK. There was a slight delay between my keystrokes and when the text appeared on screen, as you’ll see in the video. PCoIP struggled when I tried to launch Internet Explorer from the start menu. It took several seconds for the menu to load before I was able to click on the IE shortcut. Once the flash application loaded in IE, performance was pretty good.
XenDesktop fared slightly better with Microsoft Word. There was also a slight delay with text entry, but I found it better than PCoIP. You’ll notice a greater difference with the Start menu navigation. With ICA/HDX, the response was almost immediate. Opening the browser and working with the Flash application was pretty good.
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Category: Client Virtualization Tags: citrix, vmware
