only limits the bandwidth used to transfer the screen contents. Welcome to VMware Digital Workspace Tech Zone, your fastest path to understanding, evaluating, and deploying VMware End User Computing products. The evaluation process has been initiated. If possible, implement network Quality of Service (QoS) to further help maximize the capacity of these Internet circuits and prevent competing network traffic from degrading the performance of Blast Extreme. See our favorite tools, scripts, and flings from various sites. Understand and Troubleshoot Horizon Connections | VMware VMware Blast Extreme Optimization Guide | VMware The actual size of the cache will be the lesser of this value, and the value of EncoderImageCacheSizeKB set on the agent side but cannot exceed half of the available RAM. 4 If using Blast Secure Gateway 5 Not using Blast Secure Gateway 6 Standard encoded RMI 7 RMI over SSL Yes: Deselect all codecs and codec options (uncheck: H.264, Allow High Color Accuracy, and Allow High Efficiency Video Coding). Moving to the cloud? If you are using Horizon Client for macOS 5.0 or later, this Horizon Collector functionality is included in Horizon Client. See the latest innovations in Blast Extreme in VMware Horizon Control size of VMware Horizon View Blast logs Start here to understand the basics of the award-winning product suite. These settings are used to configure the address at which clients can reach the specific server when tunneling is in use. Our Communities feature the top Digital Workspace Experts across the world and 3rd-party content. Intelligence to determine and accommodate varying network conditions. TCP port 9427 is then used from the Unified Access Gateway to the agent. Used together, the JPG/PNG codec is ideally suited for typical Windows and Linux applications, including Microsoft Office. Controls the relative brightness of the paperwhite level. Tunneling traffic through the Connection Server allows for ports to be open between the Connection Server and the client, and between the Connection Server and the agent, but not between the client and the agent. Use HTML5 multimedia redirection if resource-intensive web-browser-based content such as YouTube or eLearning streaming video must be supported at high screen resolutions without NVIDIA GPUs. The Blast Codec will continue to evolve. Use our product forums to engage with the community. Note that this guidance does not include Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) or similar LANs over long distance, which typically have as much, if not more, bandwidth than common user LANs. See Enabling the USB Over Session Enhancement SDK Feature. Incorporated various recent suggestions from reviewers. The same workload on a 4K display requires up to six times the resources required by 1920 x 1080p, regardless of display protocol and codec used. Find assets to help you develop an adoption strategy that engages employees through careful messaging, education, and promotion. These settings apply to HTML Access and all Horizon Client platforms. Keep in mind, however, that Blast Extreme will always resort to using more bandwidth, if necessary, to prevent the session from crashing. NVIDIA, including GTX 10xx and 20xx series models, AMD, including Radeon RX and Vega RX models, Intel, including Intel HD Graphics 530, UHD Graphics 620, and Iris Plus Graphics 650. Figure 1: Blast Extreme Settings on Horizon Client for Windows. Added recommendations for supporting work-at-home and home-office-to-cloud use cases. Configuration Settings for Administrators, Tuning Blast Extreme for Wide Area Networks, Guidance for Work-from-Home and Home-Office-to-Cloud Use Cases, VMware Horizon Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure, A solid understanding of desktop and application virtualization, A good working knowledge of networking and infrastructure, covering topics such as Active Directory, Group Policy, and supporting technologies. For more information, see "VMware Blast Policy Settings" in the Horizon Remote Desktop Features and GPOs document. The authors wish to thank the following people for their contributions to this paper: To comment on this paper, contact VMware End-User-Computing Technical Marketing at euc_tech_content_feedback@vmware.com. In testing with a single 4K display, viewing a typical YouTube video in standard windowed mode used 53 percent less bandwidth and 23 percent less virtual desktop CPU than watching the same video full-screen. Real-Time Audio-Video (RTAV) for Horizon View - VMware End-User It is remarkable that this setup can be made to work over a WAN at all! VNCRegionEncoder_Create: region encoder adaptive. Another important aspect to consider is the size of the monitor (or monitors) to be used, and their screen resolutions. To collect logs on a Mac, you can use the. However, some use cases and situations require additional tuning, especially for wide area networks (WANs). These settings determine a virtual webcam's maximum frame rate and image resolution. Note: Requires Horizon Agent 7.11 and Horizon Client 5.3 or later. Before starting to plan or trying to troubleshoot Horizon and Blast connections, it is important to understand how a VMware Horizon Client connects to a resource. Blast Extreme supports four codecs: JPG/PNG, H.264, HEVC (H.265), and the new Blast Codec. If users are experiencing poor text or image clarity in certain applications with H.264 alone, Blast Extreme can be configured to use High Color Accuracy (HCA). HEVC provides up to 50 percent better compression with the same quality as H.264 and can also provide higher quality at similar compression ratios as H.264. With an internal connection, the client, the server, and the virtual desktop or RDSH server are all inside the corporate network. The next section describes the workflow of connections made between the client and agent components. Same applications that are ideal for H.264 while offloading the encoding from the ESXi host CPUs to an NVIDIA GPU. After comprehensive testing, we have determined that limiting frame rate provides little to no reduction in bandwidth or CPU utilization for typical applications and use cases. Contains entries that tell you whether UDP or TCP is being used. There is something for every experience level. Encoder Switch: JPG/PNG and H.264 with HCA. Use HTML5 multimedia redirection if resource-intensive web-browser-based content such as YouTube or eLearning streaming video must be supported. VMware Blast Extreme Group Policy Settings - Bits and Bytes setting, which limits only the display traffic without negatively impacting audio, file transfer, or other supporting services. The next component to optimize is the Windows operating system. Although Blast Extreme has been able to provide a functional desktop and application experience when packet loss is in excess of 20 percent, it is with noticeable degradation to user experience. See the faces behind the names of our Tech Zone content. NVIDIA Ampere A10 and A40 GPUs. Before tuning Blast Extreme, it is critical to properly size and optimize the virtual desktops, physical desktops, Microsoft RDSH servers, and supporting infrastructure. Display resource-intensive multimedia content in a window instead of full screen. For a detailed list of Blast Extreme features, see the VMware Blast Extreme topic in the VMware Horizon Architecture Planning guide. EncoderH264YUV444 Enables or turns off support for High Color Accuracy for H.264. The following updates were made to this guide. If other optimizations are not working as expected, verify there are no settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER. If testing reveals the Blast Codec is not yet able to fully support an application or use case, simply switch to one of the other three codecs for now. The following settings are specifically helpful for handling low-bandwidth conditions: Note that these minimum and maximum bandwidth settings are best effort, not hard limits. Log File Locations for Client and Agent Components, Software Requirements for Physical Desktop Machines. Depending on application workload, 4K displays can use up to six times the resources as 1080P. Increasing this setting helps improve display quality at the expense of higher bandwidth utilization. This capability not only provides a better user experience but also reduces the resources required for display protocol encoding overall. On the VM registry I configured the following GPO values: In addition, I also tried to manually configure this registry setting: Configuring the Client Clipboard Memory Size (value of 8192 decimal) [despite the fact that is was configured in the above GPO When viewing the Blast logs on the VM I see the following entry: Blast-Worker-SessionId1.log Most configuration settings can be made directly in the Windows Registry of each virtual and physical desktop and RDSH server using your preferred tool for making such registry changes. However, this example can be achieved by disabling support for the H.264 codecs competing options: JPG/PNG and HEVC. To verify operation, examine the logs. When you have created the registry key, re-initiate the connection to your VDI machine. Troubleshooting VMware Horizon View Blast Secure Gateway Service Initiation Issues (54145) - This article walks through steps to increase logging to get precise . UDP does not employ such controls and is therefore well suited for applications like streaming video and online gaming, which need to efficiently send large amounts of data to the client but can tolerate occasional errors. To use Blast Extreme, the virtual or physical desktop pool or RDSH server farm must first be configured to use the protocol as the default, or be configured to allow users to choose it. The VMware Blast ADMX template file ( vdm_blast.admx) contains policy settings for the VMware Blast display protocol. The registry location to configure Blast Extreme is: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Vmware, Inc.\Vmware Blast\Config. This means the client resorts to CPU decoding, which can result in degraded performance on weak client hardware, particularly when using high-resolution monitors. Windows desktop and server operating systems are not designed for efficient virtualization. While most of our environment is running PCoIP, we have also tested with BLAST. Added new observations on the impact of increasing screen resolution on key system resources. To observe this in action we can control the codec selection using the VMware Blast settings on the Horizon client. Note: For more information about external client connections, see Network Ports in VMware Horizon. MinBandwidthKbp and MaxBandwidthKbps also impact all services, including audio and file transfer, while MaxBandwidthKbpsPerMegaPixelSlope only limits the bandwidth used to transfer the screen contents. General settings include both Computer Configuration and User Configuration settings. Since first joining VMware in 2008, Mark has focused on helping customers succeed with their end-user computing endeavors. The VMware Blast ADMX template file ( vdm_blast.admx) contains policy settings for the VMware Blast display protocol. For more information, see Configuring HTML5 Multimedia Redirection in Configuring Remote Desktop Features in Horizon 7. There are a couple of logs you can look at that will give you Blast Extreme related information: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Blast\ Blast-Service.log. Specializing in IT architecture on every scale, Mark has designed hundreds of successful solutions for organizations of all sizes and verticals. In the following screenshot, the Horizon Performance Tracker is reporting that the Blast session is using UDP and the NVIDIA HEVC codec. For external connections, Blast Extreme can use the security certificate on the Unified Access Gateway appliance. The Connection Server returns the connection information for the virtual desktop or RDSH server that provides remote applications (on TCP port 443). If USB redirection is enabled, this traffic, this traffic uses TCP port 443 from the client to the Horizon Tunnel on the Unified Access Gateway. Same applications as for the JPG/PNG codec and the H.264 codec. Caroline Arakelian is a Senior Technical Marketing Manager, End-User-Computing Technical Marketing, VMware. HDR also requires Horizon 8 (210) or later with Horizon Agent build 2106-8.3.0-18287218 or later and Horizon Client build 2106-8.3.0-18287501 or later. Like the codec and transport options, they can be set using Group Policy or using your preferred method of making registry changes. Webcam support in VMware Horizon View is a feature that has frequently been requested. Blast Extreme is included with VMware Horizon, the latest generation of VMware desktop virtualization and remote application-delivery software. Note: This parameter does not impact the bandwidth of other services such as audio and file transfer, which are unrelated to transfer of the screen. Turn on the sound card: Fusion 7.x and above: Ensure Connect Sound card option is checked. VMware Horizon 2206 release enhances security, end-user experience, and For more information, see, Worksheet for Creating an Automated Instant-Clone Farm, Setting Up Published Desktops and Applications in Horizon, To configure the remote display protocol at the global entitlement level, see, Administering Cloud Pod Architecture in Horizon. EncoderH264Enabled Enables or turns off support for H.264. VMware made the DPI setting on the client device leading and adjusts the remote desktop accordingly. Using VMware's Horizon Performance Tracker For Rudimentary Blast The connection travels from the client to a Unified Access Gateway virtual appliance on TCP port 443, and then from the Unified Access Gateway to the Connection Server on TCP port 443. Note that this increases bandwidth and virtual desktop CPU utilization. For lossless support, enable Build-to-Lossless (EncoderBuildToPNG = 1). Critical Horizon features and components, such as the Blast Extreme display protocol, instant-clone provisioning, VMware App Volumes application delivery, and VMware Dynamic Environment Manager , are integrated with published applications and desktops to provide a seamless user experience and an easy-to-manage, scalable solution. However, it does increase client CPU utilization by up to 200 percent for the duration of the redirection (from an average of 8 to 24 percent on a sample test system). Ability to meet performance requirements for visually demanding applications when used with NVIDIA Tesla GPUbased hardware acceleration in the host. (Requires NVIDIA GPU). Use Network QoS (Quality of Service). When helping customers troubleshoot poorly performing infrastructures, VMware Professional Services routinely finds that the virtual desktops have not been sized properly and are consequently running out of critical resources such as virtual CPUs. If possible, prevent or encourage only limited use of bandwidth-intensive services such as file transfer. EncoderNvidiaHEVCEnabled Enables or turns off support for offloading HEVC encoding to NVIDIA GPUs installed in the ESXi hosts. HCA turns off 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, providing a 4:4:4 sample rate instead. VNCRegionEncoder_Create: region encoder switch. This is ideal for providing remote access to user PCs. EncoderBlastCodecEnabled Enables or turns off the Blast Codec. SwitchEnc: 1 Screen 4 switching to BlastCodec encoder. Although this results in a similar reduction in the network bandwidth required, it uses substantially more CPU processing power to encode and decode. No tuning for Network Latency: Low bandwidth / High latency Environments require additional tuning, Please see Tuning Blast Extreme for Wide Area Networks for details. By default, they are expected to be installed on dedicated, physical hardware, and not separated from their intended users by networks and display protocols. Some even suffer from packet loss, where packets never arrive at the destination at all! Same applications that are ideal for H.264 with HCA while offloading the encoding from the ESXi host CPUs to an NVIDIA GPU. VMware has developed a free tool to optimize Windows desktops and servers. The settings allow you to manage the maximum bandwidth that any one user can consume. For details about editing View Connection Server settings and security server settings, see the VMware Horizon View Administration documentation. If the UDP connection is successful, Blast assesses the networks condition to decide whether to use TCP or UDP for session traffic. The following table details the requirements for each codec. VNCRegionEncoder_Create: region encoder h264 4:2:0. For extreme low-bandwidth, high-latency, or high-performance uses cases, however, Blast Extreme comes equipped with several tuning options, as described in this guide. HTML5 multimedia redirection transfers this screen content to the client as HTML5 code instead of far less efficient display protocol traffic. If the Horizon Performance Tracker cannot be used or does not provide the desired details, the most effective way to verify the Blast Extreme configuration is to examine the log files on the virtual desktops, physical desktops, or RDSH servers. Yes: Select Allow High Efficiency Video Coding. For more information about the specific Group Policy settings and how to import the ADMX template, see VMware Blast Policy Settings in Configuring Remote Desktop Features in Horizon. However, it does increase client CPU utilization by up to 200 percent for the duration of the redirection (from an average of 8 to 24 percent on a sample test system). . WANs typically have just a fraction of the bandwidth that is available on local area networks (LANs). Is there a GPO or something? Once infrastructure resources and capacity have been verified, and the desktops and servers have been optimized, the performance of the display protocol can be tuned as necessary. Offload H.264 and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) encoding from the ESXi hosts. For more information see Configuring HTML5 Multimedia Redirectionin Configuring Remote Desktop Features in Horizon 7. For other browsers, the JPG/PNG codec is used. ) However, it is a new and rapidly evolving codec. This is typically achieved using a Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) marking of AF41. Use NVIDIA Tesla or newer GPUs. Install VMware Horizon Client on end users' machines and have end users access their remote desktops and applications. TCP 443 is used between the client and the Connection Server. HEVC supports higher-quality imaging with less bandwidth utilization than H.264. Introduced in Horizon 8 (2106): Enable support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) color. Without QoS, there is nothing to prevent lower value network traffic from impairing the performance of time-sensitive applications including Voice over IP and virtual desktops supported by display protocols like Blast Extreme. In other words, the settings do not directly enable the feature, such as forcing all connections to use H.264. Using Horizon to Access Physical Windows Machines | VMware Blast Extreme must be on TCP 443 only (as described previously for port sharing). A TCP WebSocket connection is made from the client to the Blast Secure Gateway on port 8443, and then from the Blast Secure Gateway to the virtual desktop or RDSH server on port 22443. More information about the admin settings is provided in the next section of this chapter.