Anything Is Possible! – Say Hello To My New Found Friend ‘PCoIP Ultra’

By Fredrik Brattstig @virtualbrat

I want to share with you my new experience with Teradici PCoIP Ultra. IGEL has had the integration for quite some while, but for me this is a new experience! And I really like what I see!

What is Teradici PCoIP Ultra? As many of you, that has been working with VMware Horizon, one of the display protocols are Teradici PCoIP, what many maybe doesn’t know is that Teradici are developing their protocol and have it as a remoting option in the EUC space. Teradici PCoIP Ultra will give you a state of the art remoting protocol that are able to utilize accelerated graphics for the host system, and that in combination with IGEL OS PCoIP integration, where IGEL OS can provide the h264 decoding on client side, this gives a very nice remoting experience. You do not need to use hardware acceleration for graphics, if you are not, you are basically using PCoIP. This article focuses on the Ultra piece though. When looking on the server side (what is commonly called the VDA) you can install the Teradici PCoIP agent on Windows and Linux hosts. I am using a Windows 10 host, that runs in my lab as a virtual machine (I am using Citrix Hypervisor – which is currently not supported by Teradici, but hey, it works great ). The VM has a Nvidia vGPU assigned to it to give the extra graphics kick needed for advanced graphics delivery. This means I have installed the PCoIP Graphics agent on my VM. This cool thing is that this can be installed on any workstation in your studio, not only virtual machines. Why is this important?

In the tracks of COVID and how work has shifted from in the office to work from home, this is a great drawback for graphics/film studios and designers. Basically the workstations used for these kinds of tasks are top notch expensive and big heavy machines. Do you want to send a machine costing 5-10K$ or even more with your employees to their home office? Even if you are ready to do that, does the user want to have such a beast in their living room? You might hit a NO on some of the questions in the WFH equations. At the same time you want to keep productivity up, even for the design studios!

IGEL is here to help! Both the IGEL UD3 and the IGEL UD7 (newly released and covered in this article: https://virtualbrat.com/2021/05/24/igel-entering-beast-mode-the-new-igel-ud7-about-to-be-released/ ) supports PCoIP Ultra (The current version of the IGEL UD3 was actually the first ‘thin client’-type endpoint supporting PCoIP Ultra in the market). But hey, it doesn’t stop there. As we all know, IGEL OS by it self supports hardware acceleration and can there by provide PCoIP Ultra capabilities to ANY hardware endpoint in the market. I would recommend going for a bit more high-end device, but you will certainly be able to deliver a good user experience, that while maintaining security! That’s a win-win situation, keep your employees happy at the same time as you can manage their endpoints an ensure security for home office users, and keep the expensive workstations in the office.

Teradici has support for remote users using the Teradici CAS Manager, providing a highly secure remoting protocol with extraordinary performance. While browsing the teradici.com website, I saw a note that you can sign up for Teradici PCoIP agent for macOS as a beta program that is currently running. That’s cool stuff!

If that isn’t enough, you can run the Teradici PCoIP Ultra workloads in any cloud making everything even more flexible as it supports On-premises, Cloud, Hybrid and Multi-Cloud mix.

To get going on IGEL OS, you will need a add-on license to IGEL OS Workspace Edition to enable Teradici PCoIP, reach out to your IGEL sales representative to retrieve your demo license now!

In the video below you will see a PCoIP Ultra session running on a IGEL OS endpoint where I’m creating a movie using the Video editing software Wondershare Filmora. as you can see by the video, I’m not the most skilled film maker you can find out there, but I believe that this video will give you a good impression of the user experience when you mix IGEL OS and Teradici PCoIP Ultra.

As always, enjoy with popcorn, stay safe and wash your hands!

This post was originally posted on https://virtualbrat.com