Architecture Planning

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You can specify the maximum bandwidth that can be used for audio (sound playback) in a PCoIP
session.
In addition, on most client systems, PCoIP client-side image caching stores image content on the client to
avoid retransmission. By default, the cache is 90MB if the client version is 2.0 or later.
Network Configuration Example
In a View 5.2 test pod in which one vCenter Server 5.1 instance managed 5 pools of 2,000 virtual machines in
each pool, each ESXi host had the following hardware and software for networking requirements.
NOTE This example was used in a View 5.2 setup, which was carried out prior to the release of VMware
Virtual SAN. For guidance on sizing and designing the key components of View virtual desktop
infrastructures for VMware Virtual SAN, see the white paper at
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsan/VMW-TMD-Virt-SAN-Dsn-Szing-Guid-Horizon-
View.pdf.
Physical components
for each host
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Brocade 1860 Fabric Adapter utilizing 10Gig Ethernet and FCoE for
network and storage traffic, respectively.
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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
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One 10Gb vLAN per desktop pool (5 pools)
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One 1Gb vLAN for the management network
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One 1Gb vLAN for the VMotion network
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One 10Gb vLAN for the infrastructure network
Chapter 4 Architecture Design Elements and Planning Guidelines for Remote Desktop Deployments
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