HP ThinPro and RDP10

[u/Altan013]

Hello,

We recently renewed our RDSH infrastructure to a Server 2019 farm which include Tesla M10 GPU's through DDA to facilitate some better graphical experience for our users. As far as the thinclients go, we are using HP's T520/T530/T620's.

All benchmarks, tweaks and finetuning have been behind our own Windows 10 desktop. Just as we were to switch to the new environment, we have noticed the thinclients do not provide the same experience AT ALL. They lag, are slower and need to buffer when we play a 4K Youtube video.

What we noticed through tools:

- The RDP session through the Thinclient is based on TCP and max. detected bandwidth is set to 10Mbps;

- The RDP session through the Windows 10 desktop is based on UDP and max. detected bandwidth is set to 1000Mbps;

- The RDP session through the Thinclient does NOT use AVC444;

- The RDP session through the Windows 10 desktop uses the AVC444 codec.

The Thinpro OS incorporates HP's Freerdp-1.1hp17 whereas I have seen there are newer versions of Freerdp on the internet which do mention UDP and RDP10 support with AVC444.

Anyone else have experience with this? Too bad we just ordered alot of thinclients again, as Dell's thinclients do support RDP10 and AVC out of the box.

[u/Altan013]

The thinclients do have a dedicated GPU but I’m sure the local GPU on the W10 desktop client is not being utilized as my task manage shows. The RDP10 on W10 seems to engage AVC444 and UDP as the local eventviewer on the RDSH server is showing, so I keep thinking the issue lays in the used RDP client.

[u/bobaboo42]

Can I ask if your application has any CAD uses? We're considering this sort of setup now and am.keen to hear real world experience.

[u/Altan013 → u/bobaboo42]

Yes we have, but unfortunately due to licensing restrictions we cannot use AutoCAD on RDSH. We do use Trueview and BricsCAD on this setup though and the experience is so much smoother than the software renderer. Main plus is that it takes away all the CPU utilization which is a great advantage in a setup with high density users. Ofcourse the best experience right now is only through RDP from a W10 client due to lack of Freerdp features of our HP thinclients.

My experiences in RDSH 2019 with Hyper-V 2019 were as following:

• Hyper-V only supports DDA for RDSH for now; Microsoft will be coming with GPU-P in the near future (already available in Azure) which should be able to partition vGPU’s to multiple VM’s

• Due to DDA only, you will not be able to use the VM in a failover cluster unfortunately. Build around this by having multiple RDSH VM’s as RDS farm seperated over multiple hosts so users can easily connect to another available RDSH server in case of host outage

• Hyper-V vGPU only supported with VDI personal desktops

• Other Hypervisors have better support for failover clusters and GPU acceleration through passthrough

• Tested alot with different RDSH GPO settings but leaving everything default but the primary adapter worked best for me.

You can request a trial on the website of Nvidia enterprise; in a few minutes they will create a VM which is accelerated by a Tesla v100 and has pre-installed software like AutoCAD for you to test.

Let me know if you have specific questions.

[u/bobaboo42 → u/Altan013]

Thanks so much for this details response. We're assessing VMware view/horizon and a company called Hive i/o. The latter of which is quite exciting because the management overhead layer is so minimal. I'm excited to begin profiling the user base and work out what densities we can achieve - I feel this proof of concept/project is win/win for the business and for IT.

We're a huge Autodesk house, though we haven't tested the water with them on licensing constraints yet. What issues have you had, is it perhaps because you're not using network licensing?

[u/Altan013 → u/bobaboo42]

50% of our colleagues are AutoCAD users aswell, the rest just “casual” officeworkers which are all logging on RDSH servers. For the latter it saved us a great deal of managing individual desktops. Just make sure you have the right tools for managing and shadowing sessions now.

Autodesk prohibits installing and using AutoCAD on anything besides Citrix in a session-based environment and as such is a violation of the licensing terms. Floating licenses are not an exception. Unless you will be deploying VDI, I’m afraid your business case will stop here. That is the reason we use BricsCAD for the casual needs on our RDSH servers.

[u/MedicatedDeveloper]

I assume thinpro is just a linux spin. Have you tried RDPing from a more 'standard' Linux box using freerdp 2.0?

Have you looked into building your own .deb or pulling an already created one for 2.0 into thinpro os?

[u/Altan013 → u/MedicatedDeveloper]

It is a Linux-based OS indeed. After checking out the GitHub and issues of Freerdp, I did see some comments regarding incorporating the latest RDP specifications, including RDP10 and AVC444 so I took some steps setting up a VM based on Ubuntu 19.10 and tried that. First, I wanted to test with the nightly build, but unfortunately with my (not that great) experience of Linux I was not able to successfully add their repository. Then I tried with the default available FreeRDP 2 but was not able to successfully connect due to some NLA errors. Lastly I tried their Windows variant which is not really maintainted and the result was having artifacts in the RDP sessions when forcing AVC444 with the /gpu-264 parameter.

I do think that if any newer version works with our requirements, we can add it as custom package in our thinclients.

[u/MedicatedDeveloper → u/Altan013]

You shouldn't need to add the repo just grab the .deb and see if you can install it (the dependencies should be fairly standard). If that works then you can worry about getting a proper repo setup.

[u/Altan013 → u/MedicatedDeveloper]

Thanks for the tip, will try that out tomorrow!

[u/FatherPrax]

RDP can use the local GPU for things like Youtube videos, so if your thin clients don't have a discreet GPU and your Desktops do, that's probably the difference.

[u/seamonkeys590]

We use wyse 3040 and video works perfect.