Best multimedia experience when remoting to Windows 10 on ESXi

Software & Operating Systems Windows
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1

Hi there

I was recommended this forum by a friend, to get an answer to my few months of struggling with an optimal remote desktop experience. Please bare with me, if there is an solution somewhere in the forums - I’ve tried searching, and didn’t find any newer threads about the same topic.

What I’m trying to do: Use a VM on my server for remote working, so that I just need to access my network to have everything at my hands. I’m a software developer so my work isn’t that intense on graphics, but I almost always have a half (or when things go crazy, a whole) screen dedicated to Youtube or other video streaming.
This COVID-era has also increased the need for video meetings, which therefore is a requirement, that I can use my webcam and have a good microphone quality. Most preferly I want a stable 60 fps if possible.

VM Host

  • Vmware ESXi 6.7u3
  • Ryzen 5 3600
  • 64 GB ram

VM specs

  • Windows 10
  • 12 vCPUs
  • 24 GB ram
  • GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB passthrough (no error code 43 issues) (got a screen plugged in, since I dont have a HDMI dummy yet)

Home workstation

  • Windows 10
  • Ryzen 5 3600
  • 16 GB ram
  • GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB
  • Gigabit LAN to server
  • Three screens, 1 x 1440p, 2 x 1080p

Office workstation

  • Windows 10
  • Intel i7 6700K
  • 16 GB ram
  • GeForce GTX 570
  • Gigabit WAN to server
  • Three 1080p screens

So far I have tried used the following:

Windows RDP
Works fine with meetings and work. But when hardware encoding is enabled on of the screens randomly gets pixelated. Occurs often during meetings and video playback. Video playback is also choppy. Sometimes there is an audio delay of 500ms.

Vmware Horizon with direct access
Works fine with work. Got NVIDIA HVEC working with VMWare Blast protocol. Unstable FPS during video playback cause struttering and a minor audio delay. Microphone defaults at 8000hz, which gives a low quality - and doesnt seem editable in gpedit. Got HTML5 mutimedia redirecting to work, which gives a better video playback, but it is very buggy.

Using PCOIP gives about the same result, except from no hardware encoding.

Parsec

No image.

NoMachine

Never got it working properly.

Does any one has any tips? Please ask for explantions if something doesn’t make sense - english is not my native language :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance!
Nicky

2

Horizon should be pretty good.

Have you enabled rdp to use udp? I know it’s horizon but horizon is kinda like rdp++ and you can still tweak the client and server rdp settings and enable udp.

Some firewalls have udp ‘flood limiting’ the von and firewall should permit up to 5k udp packets per stream.

In a pinch you can disable udp and go with tcp but some vpns like OpenVPN have other different issues with tcp mode rdp connections.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your feedback :slight_smile:

Horizon have so far been the best, except from the mentioned quality of life issues.

UDP is enabled, and it initiates with UDP but switches to TCP. Currently I have only tried on LAN since we are still working at home at full time. I have tested UDP between the two machines with iperf with the following result:
Interval: 0.00-30.00 sec , Transfer: 3.15 GBytes Bandwidth: 901 Mbits/sec 0.088 ms, Lost/Total Datagrams 970/412221 (0.24%)

The machines are on the same VLAN, so it doesn’t go through my virtualized pfSense firewall. Traffic from VM to worksstation at home routes through: VM → VMware vSwitch → Intel PRO 1000 PT NIC → Mikrotik CSS326-24G-2S+ → Some Zyxel 1G switch → Workstation (Intel I211)

I just cant wrap my head around this. On the paper specs should be fine. I have tweaked everything that I can imagine, yet it is not running perfectly smooth - stutters and framerate drops.

After my initial post, the HTML5 Mulitmedia redirection stopped working (no image, audio was fine), so I watched video without - this resulted in random when typing, which felt around half a second.

No system resources on any of the machines is no where close to getting maxed + there is no way near the the amount of traffic on my LAN during work hours to have any influence.