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Remember the impressive demo that David Stone gave at Synergy in Houston showing how Citrix's RAVE technology is being adapted to improve the delivery of Adobe Flash content? Perhaps you caught the video on Synergy Underground. David showed a graphics-intensive 3D Flash animation of a shark and fish swimming in the ocean. It was far beyond the typical Flash animations found on corporate web pages yet the quality was "just like local". Since then, the Apollo Multimedia Virtualization team has continued to make excellent progress enhancing SpeedScreen Flash Acceleration with our RAVE technology. I met with Dave recently and we recorded this video to show how RAVE can deliver a high definition Flash movie complete with HD audio. The user experience is amazing and server CPU consumption is extremely low. Sorry, no dates have yet been announced for beta trials or general availability. But I think you'll be amazed at what the Apollo team has already achieved. RAVE (Remote Audio & Video Extension) is a strategic technology for Citrix and a key piece of our SmartRendering vision - the intelligent combination of server-side and client-side rendering based on factors such as the particulars of the application, the capabilities of the client and the server, and the characteristics of the network connection. RAVE is already used in XenApp's SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration feature, which is now being ported to XenDesktop, to deliver high quality video and audio from hosted media players based on DirectShow, DMO or Media Foundation technology. Many customers have been asking Citrix to enhance SpeedScreen Flash Acceleration with RAVE to improve the delivery of Flash-based eLearning applications and corporate communications videos. So take a look and let us know what you think. How will this technology help your organization? What are your most important "use cases" for delivering Flash content using XenApp or XenDesktop?
Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization
Comments (14)
Sep 16, 2008
Roberto Alves says:
We are having manyyyyy problems in my organization with videos. We have XenApp 4...We are having manyyyyy problems in my organization with videos. We have XenApp 4.5 FR1 with Desktop published to a site with 60 users
using a E1 2 Mbps link. Everything works perfectly very well and without latency, but if a user open a video or a web site with high resolution
flash animations every body has latency problems.
We verifyed that the latency problem is caused because one user accessing sites like www.imperialwharf.co.uk can "crowd" the entire link,
then others users are affected. We don't have problems with processor utilization on servers or clients, but our problem is regards LINK
utilization!
You can test. Open www.imperialwharf.co.uk through ICA and verify your bandwidth utilization. This utilization is crazy.
Sep 16, 2008
Derek Thorslund says:
Link bandwidth utilization is another area where RAVE dramatically outperforms s...Link bandwidth utilization is another area where RAVE dramatically outperforms server-side rendering. You can get excellent results viewing a video with RAVE over a 256 Kbps connection, and good results at 128 Kbps. Without RAVE (current SpeedScreen Flash Acceleration technology), you generally need at least 1 Mbps of network bandwidth to get good results wih Flash videos.
Sep 17, 2008
Roberto Alves says:
Sorry, but you can do this only with LOW resolution videos or animation. If you ...Sorry, but you can do this only with LOW resolution videos or animation. If you open a HIGH resolution video or animation with RAVE over
a 256 connection your connection will frezee!!!
I agree with you that RAVE brings many benefits, but we don't have a real solution to decrease bandwidth utilization of videos and animations
RAVE works perfectly ONLY to low resolution videos like youtube or bbc videos.
Every day, web design tools are more powerful and graphics are more intensive on applications. But today you need to be crazy to
plublish a Interner Explorer for users. One user browsing some sites can affect everybody in a site.
It is a joke when we see in my company one user browsing web sites and affecting others 30 users in a E1 2 Mbps link dedicated only to
ICA traffic! We are using RAVE and all print traffic is in a different link!
Solution? We are implanting PN Agent and we will "force" users to browse web sites outside ICA. XenDesktop? Impossible.
Sep 19, 2008
Derek Thorslund says:
With RAVE for Flash (currently under development), the bandwidth consumption wil...With RAVE for Flash (currently under development), the bandwidth consumption will be no higher than if the user were running Internet Explorer locally on their PC.
Sep 20, 2008
Anonymous says:
You can configure a policy in the XenApp (Presentation Server) Console that sets...You can configure a policy in the XenApp (Presentation Server) Console that sets a maximum bandwidth for each ICA session that's covered by that policy, to prevent one user from chewing up too much bandwidth and negatively impacting everyone else.
Sep 23, 2008
Roberto Alves says:
I known about the policy, but if I set a policy to 60 kbps for example users has...I known about the policy, but if I set a policy to 60 kbps for example users has performance problems. And, this is not a
solution because I will be restricting all users to see high resolution animations, videos, pdf's, etc. Our marketing and
sales department work with high resolution pdf's, and if a user scroll down a pdf, occour the same problem!
Derek, Is there some estimation about when this new version of RAVE will be available to customers? Only for XenApp 5 or 4.5 also?
Thanks.
Sep 23, 2008
Derek Thorslund says:
Why not set the per-user bandwidth limit considerably higher than 60 Kbps? The i...Why not set the per-user bandwidth limit considerably higher than 60 Kbps? The idea is to set it high enough to give each user good performance yet well below the total bandwidth of the pipe (2 Mbps in your case) so that one user doesn't cause everyone else to experience poor performance. There is no perfect answer here but I think you should try a much higher setting, perhaps 0.5 Mbps. It isn't going to help if several users decide to play a Flash video all at the same time, but if only one or two do so that still leaves you 1 to 1.5 Mbps for the other users.
If any of our readers have some experience to share on how to best configure this policy, please send in your comments.
Sorry, no dates have yet been announced for beta trials or general availability of RAVE for Flash. But please email me your contact info etc. as I am compiling a list of beta candidates.
Derek
Nov 06, 2008
Thomas Smith says:
This technology is HUGELY important to our PS 4.5 / Wyse V10L thin client implem...This technology is HUGELY important to our PS 4.5 / Wyse V10L thin client implementation. WMV videos like the above work reasonably well, thanks to Wyse's TCX technology. However, Flash performance has in general been abominable, even via 100mbps connections. We have a large number of users who must regularly watch analyst presentations, investor relations videos, or just visit websites that are Flash-intensive. Apollo just may be the silver bullet that saves the day here.
Derek, it's been about two months since you first made this blog post. How far away are we from moving Apollo to beta, or even production?
Thank you!
Tom
Nov 07, 2008
Derek Thorslund says:
Hi Tom, Thanks for the positive feedback! I think a lot of our customers will ...Hi Tom,
Thanks for the positive feedback! I think a lot of our customers will find this new technology hugely beneficial. The Apollo team is working to get a first release to market as quickly as possible but there is still a lot of work ahead to reach General Availability. Please email me directly (derek.thorslund@citrix.com) if your company would be interested in participating in alpha or beta trials.
In a survey of several hundred Citrix customers, we identified eLearning and corporate communications as the top two use cases for Flash, followed by web site animations. So that's how we're prioritizing our efforts for the first release.
Have you checked with Wyse on their plans to add Flash support to TCX? I have some good contacts there that I can put you in touch with.
Derek
Dec 31, 2008
Anonymous says:
Hi Following up on Tom's post - our Wyse technical contact here in the UK...Hi
Following up on Tom's post - our Wyse technical contact here in the UK has told us to expect some beta code for TCX flash redirection sometime in Feb 09.
Derek - Will the next release of Xendesktop (scheduled for Q1 09?) include the flash redirection. As Tom has stated this fuctionality is crucial to our Xendesktop implementation (about 2500 desktops) which should be going live in the middle of next year.
Thanks
Dave Brear - Technical Analyst
Bull TCL
Dec 31, 2008
Anonymous says:
Hi - Dave Brear here again! After I re-read my above post it seems to infe...Hi - Dave Brear here again!
After I re-read my above post it seems to infer that I work for the same company as Tom. I don't - I was just trying to say that we are facing teh same challenges with regards to flash re-direction.
Thanks
Dave
Jan 05, 2009
Derek Thorslund says:
Hi Dave, The upcoming release of XenDesktop planned for this quarter will not ...Hi Dave,
The upcoming release of XenDesktop planned for this quarter will not include Flash redirection (RAVE for Flash); we expect to conduct beta trials of that technology in Q2, initially with the Win32 ICA plugin and for LAN environments. The first iteration of this new technology will focus on eLearning and corporate communications videos which use Flash in windowed mode.
It's great to hear that one of our key partners, Wyse, has told you they're planning a beta release of Flash redirection for their desktop appliances later this quarter. As more information becomes public on this, many Citrix customers will be interested in learning more about it.
Derek
Jul 16
Nils Sigurd Klykken says:
Hi Dave, Great presentation of what RAVE (Flash HDX) can do on the far side, bu...Hi Dave,
Great presentation of what RAVE (Flash HDX) can do on the far side, but for normal usage (webpages with flash etc) its even better. As you say, its like running it on the local computer, and what you get then is the local caching function. That is, when a user opens a webpage with flash animations, these are only "loaded" once on the client computer. This makes the bandwith consumtion as local if no policies are set to deal with this.
As for Wyse, I've heard that they are releasing a new TCX that will support Citrix new Flash HDX technology. This means that also Wyse thin clients will be able to use flash redirection by the end of this year.
Do you have an update of when the official release of Flash HDX will be released, and maybe if the developers have done some improvements since the beta release?
Sep 23
Derek Thorslund says:
Just in case you missed the announcement, HDX MediaStream for Flash is included ...Just in case you missed the announcement, HDX MediaStream for Flash is included in the XenApp 5 Feature Pack 2 release coming out this month.
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