Findings Video conference with Azure Virtual Desktop using Teams

Introduction

Over the last couple of years, there has been an impressive flux with many businesses and institutions adopting and relying on large-scale remote working and remote learning environments to maintain workforce and learning continuity. During this time, it’s generally been recognised that this type of remote working/learning has been quite successful, with many businesses and institutions continuing remoting working/learning practices or introducing hybrid models with a combination of remote and office work for their staff.

One of the reasons why remote working/learning has been successful is the availability of supporting technologies that have delivered a high standard of human communication and engagement across large numbers of workers or students/faculty in remote environments. Video conferencing applications, which includes video conferencing, screen sharing, IMs and more, are such technologies that have contributed to viable remote working/learning environment success.

But to use these applications to their fullest potential, a robust IT infrastructure is also a must. Many large enterprise companies, as well as SMB and other institutions have centralised their IT environment into virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI), either as an on-premises solution or as a managed-service by cloud service providers (CSP). Centralizing resources, applications and data into a single infrastructure allows for better IT management and security of vital resources and data which can help improve workforce productivity, data security and IT efficiencies.

Investigation overview

This blog details a recent technical investigation where popular video conferencing applications are deployed on AMD-based Azure instances to determine the performance of each application, the number of deployable users in a multi-session environment, and the user experience each person would receive. The AMD-based instances includes both CPU-only based instances and CPU+GPU based instances to understand the impact of GPU-enabled resources to the density and experience of the users.

So next let’s look at the various parameters for the investigation.

The Lab:

For the investigation, we had three areas of consideration:

Findings Video conference with Azure Virtual Desktop using Zoom

Introduction

Investigation overview

So next let’s look at the various parameters for the investigation.

The Lab:

For the investigation, we had three areas of consideration:

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VMware Horizon 7.10

VMware have released a new version of VMware Horizon 7.10, and this release is for now general available from 17th September 2019.

This is a major release, so I hope you like this article I put together.

VMware have made some huge improvements in this release, which customers/partners are going to benefit from.

VMware Horizon 7.10 is now supporting the new NVIDIA RTX GPU’s (RTX6000, RTX8000) HINT – If you are using Nvidia vGPU (on-prem) I highly recommend you upgrade to vGPU 9.1 and Horizon 7.10 and vSphere 6.7CU3.

I have in this article also included the new features of Horizon Cloud service for IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure.

Vmware Horizon 7.10 have a big update to Blast Extreme, it have a new Adaptive Codec, which replaces JPEG/PNG codec, I am excited to learn more about this and how this can benefits customers and hopefully RDanalyzer.com guys also gets this into their client so we can better understand what’s happening inside the protocol from a user perspective.

Vmware also have a new Codec switching which automatically switches codec based on screen content: I can see a big value for end users with this new feature and this will make experience even better with VMware Horizon.

VMware Horizon 7.10 is a Extended Service Branch (ESB) release, VMware Horizon 7.10 supports now VMware Skyline Log Assist for better logging and analysis.

VMware also made this great video of what’s new

Now, lets dig into what’s new in this major release.

What is new in VMware Horizon 7.10

VMware Horizon 7.10 provides the following new features and enhancements

VMware Horizon Connection Server On-Premises
VMware Horizon Agent for Linux
VMware Horizon Agent for Windows
VMware Horizon GPO Bundle
VMware Dynamic Environment Manager 9.9 (former VUEM)
VMware Unified Access Gateway 3.7
VMware AppVolume 2.18
VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon 6.6
VMware Horizon Clients 5.2 for Android, Chrome, Linux, iOS, Mac, Windows, UWP, HTML Access

VMware Horizon Cloud services:

VMware Horizon Cloud Service 2.1 (Azure, AWS, On-prem)
VMware Horizon Cloud Service on IBM Cloud 19.3

NVIDIA GRID 2.0 integrated in Microsoft Azure

At Microsoft Azurecon 2015, NVIDIA announced that Microsoft will offer NVIDIA GPU-enabled professional graphics applications and accelerated computing capabilities to customers worldwide through its cloud platform, Microsoft Azure.

Deploying the latest version of NVIDIA GRID^™ in its new N-Series virtual machine offering, Azure is the first cloud computing platform to provide GRID 2.0 virtualized graphics for enterprise customers.

For the first time, businesses will have the ability to deploy NVIDIA Quadro® grade professional graphics applications and accelerated computing on-premises, in the cloud through Azure, or via a hybrid of the two using both Windows and Linux virtual machines. Azure will also offer customers supercomputing-class performance, with the addition of the Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform’s flagship Tesla® K80 GPU accelerators, for the most computationally demanding data center and high performance computing (HPC) applications.

Unprecedented Virtualized Graphics Performance

With NVIDIA GRID enterprises can deliver graphics intensive applications from companies such as Autodesk, ESRI and Siemens from the cloud to their users. Announced last month, NVIDIA GRID 2.0 provides the NVIDIA Quadro GPU driver support, features and performance that graphics-intensive applications require, as well as other enhancements including double the application performance of the previous generation of GRID GPUs and Linux OS support.

Supercomputing in the Cloud

The Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform is designed from the ground up for power-efficient, high performance computing (HPC), computational science, supercomputing, data analytics and deep learning applications.

Powering some of the world’s highest performance supercomputers, the Tesla platform delivers dramatically higher performance and energy efficiency than a CPU-only approach and unprecedented application throughput in the data center.

By deploying the Tesla K80 GPU accelerator in its N-Series virtual machines, Azure dramatically expands access to supercomputing-class performance, enabling enterprises worldwide to accelerate their most demanding workloads, without requiring them to invest in, build and maintain dedicated computing resources.

Azure N-series, a new family of Azure Virtual Machines

Available in preview within the next few months, the N-series will feature the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform as well as NVIDIA GRID 2.0 technology, providing the highest-end graphics support available in the cloud today.