Direct PCoIP Connections to Desktops


Andre Leibovici has posted an interesting article at myvirtualcloud.net about direct PCoIP connections to VDI Desktops.  Apparently, VMware is testing this ability right now and is considering making it generally available; I find this fascinating!

Andre points out a couple of use cases that seem largely focused on the small business space.  The use case that I’m most interested in is the “Cloud Provisioning” option that he mentions.  I’m interested in that because, near as I can tell, “Cloud Provisioning” really just means “desktops that are not provisioned or managed by View”.  That is exciting because it might open the doors for deeper 3rd party integration or whole 3rd party connection brokering for PCoIP (like the late Panologic did with RDP sessions).

My favorite aspect of Panologic’s solution was how seamless it was, from the user perspective.  Since the VDI desktop could be associated with the Pano device, the RDP session was established as soon as the device booted.  That meant that the user only ever saw a Windows login prompt; as far as they could tell, it was just a windows system with no View Client or anything like that to worry about.  That’s attractive to me because users tend to grow easily confused and anything that we can do to make the VDI solution invisible is a good thing.  Andre’s article describes this exact situation, but with PCoIP – yeah!

So, it sounds like this feature will enable another VDI use case, as well as enabling better 3rd party integration.  From my perspective, that’s a win-win.  Also, that article has the most elegant diagram of the client to desktop network session that I’ve ever seen; it highlights the simplicity of this solution in a very visceral way.  It’s worth reading the article for that diagram alone.

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