VMware Horizon

Deliver a responsive, predictable VMware Horizon experience over long distances or unpredictable networks. Silver Peak protects and optimizes Horizon traffic, reducing and often eliminating packet loss and other effects of network congestion that undermine Horizon performance. 

VMware Horizon is a popular thin-client solution that allows desktops and applications to be published using HTTP, RDP, or Teradici's PCoIP. While Horizon performs well within the office or campus, long distances may pose a challenge.  The added delay from distance,  provider routing policies and peering practices, undermine data throughput. Coupled with the increased amounts of packet loss and out-of-order packets of site-to-site connections, normally responsive VMware Horizon applications or desktops can become sluggish and unresponsive. Users end up repeatedly hitting keys, generating more traffic, and further compounding the problem.

Silver Peak optimizes Horizon, enabling a faster, more predictable user experience at every office. Exact benefits will depend on the protocol being used to connect to the Horizon client. All of the Horizon clients gain from Silver Peak’s ability to mitigate the effects of congestion, deduplicate TCP and UDP traffic, and select the path with the least loss or latency. The HTTP client will gain from Silver Peak’s latency compensation algorithms and will benefit the most from Silver Peak’s deduplication algorithms. More specifically, Silver Peak addresses the following network challenges: 

• Congestion – Silver Peak makes VMware Horizon performance more predictable across congested wide area networks (WANs). Lost packets are reconstituted in real-time at the far end of a WAN link, avoiding delays that come with multiple round-trip retransmissions. Out-of-order packets are resequenced, avoiding retransmission and processing delays that occur when packets arrive out-of-order. Dynamic Path Control selects the path with the least loss on-the-fly. Bandwidth is guaranteed through application classification, packet marking, queuing and shaping.
• Bandwidth – Silver Peak byte-level deduplication removes extraneous VMware Horizon data from the WAN when operating over HTTP and RDP. The first time VMware Horizon sends data it is fingerprinted and compressed by Silver Peak. Subsequent requests are fulfilled by the local Silver Peak instance. PCoIP runs over UDP, which can be deduplicated by Silver Peak, but the client-side encryption minimizes any deduplication benefits.  
• Latency – Silver Peak mitigates latency enabling VMware Horizon’s HTTP client to operate more efficiently over distance. TCP Acceleration includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. Neither RDP nor PCoIP, which run over UDP, will benefit from TCP Acceleration. Latency is also reduced through packet coalescing, which re-packages multiple smaller packets into a single larger one, and through Dynamic Path Control, which selects the fastest path to a remote location.

Silver Peak protects VMware Horizon data in-flight between locations with an Accelerated IPSec virtual private network (VPN) running AES-256, the enterprise standard for data encryption. Data-at-rest within Silver Peak instances is also encrypted with AES. End-to-end encryption is provided by SSL/TLS.

Silver Peak offers the most scalable and cost-effective data acceleration software for connecting data centers, remote offices and the cloud. Download and deploy it  yourself in just 20 minutes or contact us to see how Silver Peak can help your team.