PCoIP painting issues
Finally got PCoIP with View 4.0.1 up and running. All excited and thrilled to compare it to RDP. It was looking good until I fired up IE 8 and went to a couple websites. Some had issues.. Some didn’t.
IE8 based Painting Issues
I then launched vSphere client only to be unable to see any of the objects in the left hand window in the client.
vSphere Painting Issues
This VM is running on ESX 3.5U4 on VM Hardware 4. The quick fix is to upgrade to VM Hardware 7 which entails all the updates to vSphere 4 & VM tools updates.
The other fix is due to the following two bugs in Hardware version 4.
- Completely uninstall the View Agent
- Reboot
- Reinstall the View Agent (Make sure that the Video Driver version is [...].0032)
If this doesn’t do it then you are probably having an issue with VRAM. The fix is to adjust the pool inside of View for this machine and set the resolution and # of monitors so they come out to a number divisible by 64. (Kudos to my Support Wizard for finding this one.)
The magic formula is
((#of monitors * Width of Resolution) * (# of monitors * Height of Resolution) * 4 )/1024 == Multiple of 64
Keep in mind if you have less monitors than you set the pool to, PCoIP handles this gracefully and it doesn’t cause issues.
In: VMware · Tagged with: pcoip, view, VMware
on 28 March 2010 at 11:29 am
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Hi Ian,
I’m not sure that magic formula is right. Look at the table on the current View Architecture Guide (http://www.vmware.com/pdf/view401_architecture_planning.pdf) at the top of page 28. I tried a couple in your formula and they didn’t match. Any ideas? Or am I looking at the wrong table?
Thanks, Forbes.
on 29 March 2010 at 10:35 pm
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I’m confused by what you are misunderstanding here Forbes?
on 30 March 2010 at 9:49 am
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OK, here’s an example. Say you have 2 monitors at 1920×1080. The formula you give above would make this:
((2 x 1920) x (2 x 1080) x 4)/1024 = 32400
The table in the VMware PDF states that 2 monitors at 1920×1080 will need another 124.92MB (which is rounded up to 128MB) of RAM.
on 31 March 2010 at 11:20 pm
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The sizing formula in this post is not how much additional RAM you need to allocate for it to work. This formula is a way around a bug in how the Video HW works in Hardware Version 4.
So in this case if you are triggering this bug and having issues with PCoIP after uninstalling and clean installing the View Agent, you need to find a display setting that fits into the formula in question.
2 Monitors at 1920×1080 max resolution
ie. ((2 x 1920) x (2 x 1080) x 4)/1024 = 32400 Then 32400/64 = 506.25. Which is not a divisor of 64. You would still be in a situation where this bug could be happening.
Instead if you go and set the pool’s maximum desktop setting of 4 monitors at 1920×1080 max resolution you would end up with ((4 x 1920) x (4 x 1080) x 4)/1024 = 129,600. 129,600/64 = 2,025. This is a divisor of 64. Therefore this would prevent the VRAM bug from triggering.
on 5 April 2010 at 9:28 am
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Ahhhh, penny drops
Okay, sorry for the confusion. Thanks for taking the time to explain what this was for.