PCoIP Configuration Utility – Update Sneak Peek!

Wanted to share some of the progress I have made on the PCoIP Configuration Utility. It’s not quite ready for prime time just yet but it’s getting close.

One of the requests I had gotten was to allow the context menu to be opened with a left-click vs. a right-click as it’s not so easy to trigger a right-click when accessing a desktop from a mobile device. This change is in place. A right-click or a left-click can be used to open the context menu.

Another request was to add some form of “health” monitoring of the connection. I thought this was a great idea but the actual implementation is fraught with issues. Still, based upon what I know of PCoIP I figured there should be a few things you can monitor and compare against some “common sense” baselines to determine if things are looking good or looking bad. So that’s where I went. I’ll cover this again in the official release post (likely a few weeks out I am sad to say) but this is NOT a “user experience” meter! View and PCoIP continue to improve in their tolerance for less-than-ideal network conditions such that even on a highly latent or slightly lossy network connection you can still have a good user experience, but the fact remains that the connection itself is less than ideal – and that’s what the tool will be showing you.  It might also be the case that the network conditions are just fine and yet your user experience could be bad – this might be from lack of CPU on the VM or client side, or other factors – I can’t measure all of those, and so I can’t show you why things might be bad in that case – but at the very least you can have some peace of mind that it’s probably not the network. I just throw these examples out to show that network health alone (as measured by PCoIP) cannot be directly correlated to end-user experience. Often they will be reflective of each other – but not ALWAYS.  Are we clear? Ok. Good.

The health score calculations themselves I’m not going to cover in too much detail, but basically there are 4 items being calculated or measured directly (and then factored into other calculations):

• Packet Loss
• Latency
• Variance/Jitter
• Available Bandwidth/Bandwidth Limitng

So what does this new stuff look like? First off you’ll notice that the systray icon for the tool is slightly different.  It now has a status “LED”:

Green to red - blinky blinky!

This is so that users can have at-a-glance visibility into the general health of the connection and is probably the way most people will interact with this new feature. However, if you want a more detailed view of the health rating there’s also a new menu option:

Can you find the new option?

Selecting this will pop-out a new window giving a bit more detail into how the current health score is being generated. Let’s look at a few examples…

Happy, healthy (LAN) connection:

Doesn't get much better than this

Connection with moderate latency and variance:

Yes, that is the video you think it is...

Another showing packet loss and the fact that PCoIP is adapting down bandwidth to deal with that loss:

Where, oh where, have all those packets gone?!

And the “I need to play flawless video to my offshore users, 15,000 miles away across homing pigeons carrying floppy disks” connection (a.k.a. business as usual for VMware PSO):

What do you mean it's a network problem?!

So there you have it, a sneak peek at what’s coming soon in the PCoIP Configuration Utility. I am also hoping to have a profile import/export function to make it easier to share and distribute PCoIP tuning profiles. Check back in a few weeks and let’s see where we land.