The fourth Blast Extreme codec option is HEVC. Find assets to help you develop an adoption strategy that engages employees through careful messaging, education, and promotion. However, it does increase client CPU utilization by up to 200 percent for the duration of the redirection (from an average of 8 to 24 percent on a sample test system). Note: Despite the presence of a physical GPU, Blast Extreme with physical desktops is not able to offload H.264, H.264 with High Color Accuracy, or High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) encoding, even with NVIDIA GPUs. Another key Blast Extreme innovation is the encoder switch. To determine whether the session is using UDP or TCP, review the latest entries in the Blast-Worker-SessionId<#>.log file, and look for the entries such as those shown in the following table. It is designed to support the majority of customer use cases, including not just typical Windows and Linux apps like Microsoft Office, but also SaaS applications, line-of-business apps like Point of Sale, plus any that require low-motion, high-quality graphics support such as CATIA, Photoshop, and AutoCAD. Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure Activity Path. These settings are used to configure the address at which clients can reach the specific server when tunneling is in use. Learn how to architect the right security solutions for your business needs. Use a single monitor with the lowest screen resolution supported by the use case. Figure 2: Internal Connection from Client to Agent Using Blast Extreme. HDR: Relative Brightness of the Paperwhite Level. VMware Blast Extreme Optimization Guide | VMware Start with these recommendations before moving on to more specialized settings. The same workload on a 4K display requires up to six times the resources required by 1920 x 1080p, regardless of display protocol and codec used. The port used by the Blast Secure Gateway on the Unified Access Gateway can be customized (for example, it can use TCP 443). Because H.264 also provides good support for most Windows, Linux, and macOS applications, it is also the default Blast Extreme codec option. One of his key roles as Senior Product Line Manager on the VMware Desktop Product Management team is leading the effort to benchmark and develop comprehensive guidance for VMware Blast Extreme. The connection workflow descriptions in this section also include information about the configurable components of Blast Extreme and the various Blast Extreme services and processes that are built into the virtual desktop agent. Depending on application workload, 4K displays can use up to six times the resources as 1080P. Screen 0/1 @ Resolution: 3840 x 2160. There are several ways that these settings can be applied. Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure Activity Path. Blast-Worker-SessionID#.txt. Note: This additional color information with HCA increases session bandwidth utilization by 5 percent on average. If users experience any of these issues, HCA can be enabled to improve quality while preserving H.264s multimedia efficiency. High Efficiency Video Coding, or HEVC for short, is also known as H.265 and is the industry successor to H.264. Introduced in Horizon 8 (2106) is support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) encoding to provide higher graphical quality with vastly improved color range and contrast. In testing this has been shown to decrease the amount of network bandwidth used by Blast Extreme. Deselect all other codecs and codec options. Note that HDR is an optional capability of HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding, H.265) and requires an NVIDIA hardware GPU. Streaming video, for example, may freeze for a moment or pixelate briefly, but otherwise continue playing. And limiting frame rate for multimedia use cases such as streaming video simply impairs playback quality and user experience. Horizon Client (4.7): Forcing settings by GPO - VMware These settings apply to HTML Access and all Horizon Client platforms. Client-drive redirection traffic uses TCP 9427. or you can specify that users can choose the protocol. 1 enabled in both directions This directory contains logs for the three Blast Extreme components: For more information about the entries in these log files, see How to Verify Configuration in the VMware Blast Extreme Optimization Guide. However, if the network also supports interactive video, Blast Extreme is often marked one-level lower with a DSCP marking of AF31. Figure 5: Path in the Group Policy Editor for Turning On the Microsoft Teams Optimization Feature Double-click to open and turn on the policy. Note that this guidance does not include Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) or similar LANs over long distance, which typically have as much, if not more, bandwidth than common user LANs. Update for VMware Horizon 7 version 7.10. VMware Horizon ports and network connectivity requirements (1027217) Some even suffer from packet loss, where packets never arrive at the destination at all! Yes: Select Allow High Efficiency Video Coding. SwitchEnc: 1 Screen 0 switching to h264 4:4:4 encoder. Visit these other VMware sites for additional resources and content. Troubleshooting Intermittent Blast Connection Issues in - VMware Increasing this setting helps improve display quality at the expense of higher bandwidth utilization. Figure 1: Choosing Blast Extreme in the Horizon Client Options. Display communication protocols provide end users with a graphical interface to a remote desktop or published application. Keep in mind that MinBandwidthKbp and MaxBandwidthKbps also impact all services, including audio and file transfer, while MaxBandwidthKbpsPerMegaPixelSlope only limits the bandwidth used to transfer the screen contents. In this mode, under typical application conditions, Blast Extreme uses the Blast Codec or JPG/PNG codec, both of which are optimized for text and still image quality. Running traditionally full-screen applications in a window instead of full-screen can also slash bandwidth utilization. Test the new Blast Codec. To observe this in action we can control the codec selection using the VMware Blast settings on the Horizon client. There are a couple of logs you can look at that will give you Blast Extreme related information: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Blast\ Blast-Service.log. 2. MaxBandwidthKbpsPerMegaPixelSlope The maximum bandwidth used to transfer screen contents per megapixel remoted, in kilobits per second. For more information, see Configuring HTML5 Multimedia Redirection in Configuring Remote Desktop Features in Horizon 7. The Blast Codec will continue to evolve. Typical Microsoft Office use, for example, results in a very low display protocol frame rate. (which like all VMware flings, is not officially supported). Figure 1: Blast Extreme Settings on Horizon Client for Windows. Test the new Blast Codec unless this use-case is primarily in support of full motion video or high-speed motion graphics such as gaming. Special note about NVIDIA GPU supported use cases: Using NVIDIA GPUs to support H.264 and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) substantially increases session bandwidth. Contains entries that tell you whether JPG/PNG or the H.264 coded is being used. In testing, viewing a YouTube video in a standard window instead of full-screen reduced bandwidth utilization by 53 percent. With the exception of Build-to-Lossless which impacts all screens at all resolutions, each logfile entry denotes the codec used, the number of the screen (monitor) being configured of the total number, and its display resolution. Requires NVIDIA GPU. Using articles, videos, and labs, this activity path provides the fastest way to learn Workspace ONE! Blast gateway not running when a Certificate generated from IIS is used (89820) - This article outlines a scenario where a generated certificate key cannot be read and Blast fails. VNCRegionEncoder_Create: region encoder BlastCodec. This is simply due to the larger number of pixels that must be supported at higher resolutions. Applications that require the same quality as H.264 with less bandwidth utilization or that require higher quality with similar bandwidth utilization as H.264. Demanding graphical applications commonly require more than two virtual CPUs, even with hardware GPU support. For lossless support, enable Build-to-Lossless (EncoderBuildToPNG = 1). More than 8 virtual CPUs might be required to support the most demanding use cases, especially video gaming, even with NVIDIA hardware GPUs. However, in testing it has been determined that only Intel GPUs support OpenGL applications in a remote session. This provides increased scalability and better performance, especially in CPU-constrained ESXi environments without NVIDIA GPUs. To provide secure access from external locations and over the Internet, VMware Unified Access Gateway is deployed to provide secure edge services. This connection is from the client to UDP port 8443 on the Unified Access Gateway. If users are experiencing poor text or image clarity in certain applications with H.264 alone, Blast Extreme can be configured to use High Color Accuracy (HCA). Use our product forums to engage with the community. With an internal tunneled connection, the client, the server, and the virtual desktop or RDSH server are all also inside the corporate network, but the clients might be on a different subnet from that of the virtual desktops or RDSH servers (where the agent is installed), and you do not want to open ports between the clients and agents directly. Navigate the sophisticated world of Unified Access Gateway (UAG) for Workspace ONE and Horizon 8. With non-multimedia workloads, the Blast Codec uses the least bandwidth compared to all other codec options. Blast Extreme was carefully designed to provide an excellent out-of-the-box experience, with no additional configuration required in almost all cases. One of the easiest methods is to use the Windows Group Policy template provided with each release of VMware Horizon. If extensive use of graphically intensive content such as streaming video must be supported, consider asking users to view this content in a window, instead of full-screen mode. Intelligence to determine and accommodate varying network conditions. blast-worker-sessionid1.log . Note: For more information about tunneled connections, see Network Ports in VMware Horizon. We also frequently discover that the underlying ESXi hosts are overutilized and are exhibiting clear indicators of problems impacting user experience such as high CPU Ready times. The Horizon Performance Tracker is an option that can be selected during the Horizon Agent installation on the virtual desktop, physical desktop, or RDSH server. : Because port sharing incurs some performance overhead on Unified Access Gateway, port sharing is not the preferred configuration. It is especially good at reproducing intricate fonts and other screen content with fine details, including still images and low-motion 3D modeling used by design and engineering applications. Keep in mind that this may complicate WAN use cases. It is important to recognize, however, that no display protocol can provide a perfect LAN experience over typical WANs. If possible, prevent or encourage only limited use of bandwidth-intensive services such as file transfer. Note: At this point, the VMware Blast service on the agent side (Horizon Agent on the virtual desktop or RDSH server) proxies the incoming TCP connection. It is better to leverage HTML5 multimedia redirection to optimize such use cases. UDP does not employ such controls and is therefore well suited for applications like streaming video and online gaming, which need to efficiently send large amounts of data to the client but can tolerate occasional errors. Note: Setting this option to 100 will not provide a lossless image. It also causes some screen content to letterbox, which may impair user experience. Blast Extreme includes the following security features to support Horizon: Display protocols must be able to efficiently provide the best user experience for various types of screen content, including text, still images, streaming video, 3D rendering, and audio. Horizon Client version 5.2 only also requires a special configuration file on the client (see the note following this table). HEVC requires NVIDIA GPUs to be installed in the ESXi hosts to offload encoding. Yes. Another important aspect to consider is the size of the monitor (or monitors) to be used, and their screen resolutions. Other codec options can only be enabled by administrators and also require a corresponding Horizon Client setting. Incorporated various recent suggestions from reviewers. Note, however, that the encoder switch cannot currently be used with High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) or when H.264 and H.264 with High Color Accuracy encoding is offloaded to an NVIDIA GPU. NVIDIA Encoded H.264(H.264 Offloaded to GPU). NVIDIA, including GTX 10xx and 20xx series models, AMD, including Radeon RX and Vega RX models, Intel, including Intel HD Graphics 530, UHD Graphics 620, and Iris Plus Graphics 650. Access technical, third-party tips, tricks, and how-tos. Like HEVC, the encoding for H.264 and H.264 with HCA can be offloaded to NVIDIA GPUs installed in the ESXi hosts. Note: At this point, the VMware Blast service on the agent side (Horizon Agent on the virtual desktop or RDSH server) proxies the incoming connection. If the administrator has enabled additional remote experience features such as USB redirection or client-drive redirection (CDR), the administrator can choose whether traffic for these features will be carried on virtual channels within the Blast session or on separate dedicated connections. PixelProviderHDRReferenceWhite - Introduced in Horizon 8 (2106). These optimizations directly reduce both CPU and network bandwidth. Explore how VMware can help solve an IT team's most pressing digital workspace challenges. Click OK to remove the IPSec rules. Be certain to test key applications and multimedia content before widespread deployment. I'm sure this feature looked awesome on paper. PDF Using VMware Horizon View HTML Access - Horizon View Begin your journey leveraging cloud-based services for desktop environments. Use NVIDIA Tesla or newer GPUs. EncoderBuildToPNG Enables or turns off build-to-lossless mode for the JPG/PNG codec. To set up the Horizon environment for Blast Extreme, administrators open various firewall ports and select Blast Extreme as the default display protocol or as a possible protocol choice for end users: Use the correct version of Horizon and related components: With Horizon 7 version 7.7, VMware introduced the ability to broker physical desktop machines running Windows 10 version 1803 and 1809 Enterprise Edition, via the Blast Extreme display protocol.