Comparing RDP and PcoIP protocols for desktop virtualization inVMware enviroment

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure refers to a process of running user's desktop in a virtual machine that lives on a server in the datacenter. A protocol is important in the communication process of virtual desktop infrastructure. For small deployment scenario, we have two options: using built-in RDP protocol that comes from Windows desktop; or adding more investment for PCoIP protocol in VMware environment. This paper try to analyze the performance difference between RDP and PCoIP, using PCMark to simulates daily task and applications, and at the same time using network monitoring tools to measure the bandwidth consumption of the tested protocols. The test result shown that there is very slight performance difference between RDP and PCoIP, but the interesting part comes that PCoIP is more advanced for multimedia, it shown superior performance for multimedia playback (no artifacts like on RDP). Beyond its limitation, RDP is still suitable for users that want to deploy small scale of desktop virtualization for light tasks like office productivity (more text, less graphics) may consider RDP as starting deployment protocol.