Wyse Clients and RDP Performance.....

R.O.S.S.I · 16 Aug 2013 at 10:59

Hi all, we currently use Wyse S10 thin clients for our remote sites which are setup to RDP back to our head office and all users work on one server. All works pretty well to be fair however I know these Wyse clients are pretty old school now as far as the technology goes but they just work and do their job well.

The only thing that is a bit of an issue for me is that when people are in their session and they are viewing web pages which are image heavy the screens are pretty jerky and also watching YouTube videos via them is pretty much the same.

I'm just wondering is this a limitation of the hardware? I.e. would getting some faster/newer Wyse clients remedy this? Or is this purely a limitation of RDP itself? Or is it a limitation of the Wyse Thin OS version they are on (6.5.0_22)?

I've not quite delved into the RemoteFX stuff much yet but I'm not sure if this would help it or not? Users get the aero interface in their sessions and everything looks pretty "rich" and Win 7'ish.

Another thought I had was could it be the net connection at the sites not being fast enough?
We've got ASDL2 at our remote sites and FTTC at our main site that they connect to and I wouldn't have thought the 20MB upload and 16MB download that is available would struggle with that amount of RDP traffic (There is probably 15 people max at any one time RDP'ing in).

Anyone any ideas? Is this an optimisation that I need to make server side or am I going to need better thin clients?

paradigm · 16 Aug 2013 at 11:26

RemoteFX would allow for hardware based 3D acceleration, but as most desktop compositing would be 2D I'm not sure if it would help or not. Gut feeling would be no.

R.O.S.S.I · 16 Aug 2013 at 11:28

That's what I thought, I didn't think it would actually help that much.

Hellsmk2 · 20 Aug 2013 at 19:55

It's a limitation of rdp. RemoteFX definitely does help, but you can only enable it if your hyper visor is hyper-v.

What OS are the clients connecting to? I found 2008 R2 multimedia performance to be a massive improvement on 03, and 2012 an equally big improvement on R2.

R.O.S.S.I · 20 Aug 2013 at 20:05

Its a 2008 R2 server we don't have any 2003 or 2012 servers.

Wizzkidy · 21 Aug 2013 at 13:57

Be very careful with a setup with Wyse thin client, We had a small company that wanted a new system and decided to go with thin client options using personal virtual desktops.

for general work within office its fine, as soon as you started to put any graphic intensive webpages or youtube for example the performance just died. this included sound skipping as well.

I can't remember the model of thin client but the thin clients were topping out CPU.

RemoteFX might resolve some of the issues although its not cheap due to the correct GFX card you have to buy (depending on server used)

After speaking with Wyse they advised only 1 model in the range would suffice which again I can't remember. We replaced the thin clients with a HP model with a bit more CPU grunt which did make things slightly better but overall without remoteFX don't expect anything great from video through PVD's

paradigm · 21 Aug 2013 at 17:29

Wizzkidy said:
RemoteFX might resolve some of the issues although its not cheap due to the correct GFX card you have to buy (depending on server used)

Not strictly true. Whilst it's not supported, we've got a farm of hypervisors running multiple Radeon 6450's (£40~ each) and Server 2012. They host RemoteFX sessions without problem

R.O.S.S.I · 22 Aug 2013 at 11:42

The reason I asked whether or not it was a a hardware limitation or not is because i've also set up some old desktops we had lying around as thin clients.

Ive got them running Windows ThinPC and set up in a kiosk mode to auto run an mstsc file on boot up to RDP them into the server. Now these are old machines which originally had XP on, they've got AMD64 x2 processors in and between 1gb and 2gb of RAM but these all browse the web pretty much perfect and play YouTube video without hitch.

The only other factor thing that is different and which could contribute to their good performance is the fact that they are on the same LAN as the RDP server they are connecting to.

So i'm thinking that the environment I've set up is OK to deal with browsing content rich websites and its either a hardware limitation (of the Wyse terminal we're using) or a limitation of being on a remote site with a less network bandwidth.

Does that sound about right?