View 3.1 USB Redirection Improvements

As you probably have seen, View 3.1 GA’d yesterday. One of the improvements listed in the release notes was:

USB Improvements – View 3.1 offers more reliable and broader device support with reduced bandwidth consumption. A separate TCP/IP stream is used.

From what I understand in talking to some people is that a lot of time was spent on the USB redirection stack to further optimize and tune it.

ALSO, USB redirection traffic is now split out onto it’s own traffic stream. USB redirection traffic will now communicate from the client to the host vm on TCP port 32111. I imagine this opens up a few new opportunities to do some USB specific traffic prioritization/trottling. Very interesting! In previous versions, the USB traffic was inside of the RDP stream (virtual channel). This prevented us from ever REALLY seeing the USB specific traffic or having any control over it. Simply put, now we do. Gotta love progress!

Tags: Rick Westrate, USB Redirection, VMware, VMware View

Rick Westrate

If I'm not mistaken, Flash throttling occurs server side and is not currently broken out into a separate RDP virtual channel. 3.1 does not have true multimedia redirection for Flash yet. I know for some of the other multimedia codecs there is a true breakout of the data that is sent down the MMR virtual channel to the endpoint where it then uses the client-side CPU to process and display the multimedia. I will double check on the Flash virtual channel though as this is the first I had heard of it...and my sources are usually pretty good! :-)
That said, all the MMR stuff is still within a RDP virtual channel so from a network perspective you would only see RDP traffic. The USB redirection is truly a complete breakout of the USB traffic from RDP into its own unique TCP stream on port 32111.

ccostan

Interesting, I believe they are also doing this with the new FLASH throttling improvements. Seperating it out of the main stream and into it's own channel.

Carlo.

View 3.1 USB Redirection Improvements

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