(RDS) Tip of the Day: RDP and PCoIP graphics accelerated virtualization solutions

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Today's tip...

The evolution of the GPUs has advanced enough that a virtual machine can be configured to provide access to physical GPU capabilities to any virtualized application that needs access to an actual physical GPU. There are many different technologies and protocols that can do that, and most of them are already deployed in popular cloud services on Azure, AWS and other hosting providers. However, there are not very many articles that compare the virtualization, remoting, technologies, and protocols that take advantage of graphics acceleration. There are many good reasons for that; remoting technologies are complex to deploy, require quite a bit of knowledge in the space to successfully test, takes quite a bit of time to diligently prepare, properly measure and create a comprehensive report.

 

Thankfully two experts in the space decided to spend the time and effort to do just that. It has been quite a while since there was an article like that, but Benny Tritsch and Kristin Griffin did an excellent job of comparing two very popular and successful protocols that provide solutions to run virtualized graphics accelerated applications, RDP and PCoIP. Check out the results of their tests and view some of the recorded videos.

 

The article provides an exhaustive description of the testing methodology and illustrates the findings with text and videos. It does require familiarity with the used remoting technologies and the apps used in the test cases. It is a great illustration of two state of the art remoting technologies available today. The article goes into great details to argue the advantages of the compared protocols and solutions. The tests are done in lab environment with network simulator to isolate Internet unpredictability and create predictable and easy to replicate network conditions. A user can use the prescribed methodology and apps in cloud services like Azure or AWS and make conclusions for themselves in their own test environment.

 

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