This is a cloud powered application that is mainly used for collaboration among remotely working employees. Its key features include video meetings, white boarding, file sharing as well as messaging. You can also avail a virtual meeting room. As the name suggests, this is a cloud based online meeting solution.
The move to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is becoming more common. It’s hard to ignore benefits such as cost reductions, security, and data recovery. Customers considering this transition often ask whether they can deploy their Cisco collaboration applications in their virtual desktop environment. The answer is yes.
- Webex Teams is the leading team collaboration app. Get access to screensharing, group messaging, cross-collaboration tools, and app integrations.
- Using Webex in a virtualized environment requires the following components. Connection broker —The resource and connection manager (Citrix, VMware) that connects the virtualization provider to the thin client. Hosted virtual desktop (HVD) —The Virtual Machine (VM) that runs Webex.
- Step 1: Authenticate Webex + Citrix ShareFile. ( 30 seconds) Step 2: Pick one of the apps as a trigger, which will kick off your automation. ( 15 seconds) Step 3: Choose a resulting action from the other app. ( 15 seconds) Step 4: Select the data you want to send from one app to the other.
- Cisco Webex Support 9.1. Based on 3 answers. The Enterprise package we purchased (Event Center, Remote Support, Meeting Center, and Training Center) for 100 users is the same annual price as GoToMeeting for 25 users. We will renew as it is a package deal. If it were just WebEx Remote Support, we would not renew at all.
Cisco has been on the forefront of providing HD video and audio and content sharing on VDI thin clients for years with Cisco Jabber. We’ve worked tirelessly to optimize the experience for these environments while delivering the superior quality your users need to collaborate and to get work done. Today, users can not only message and call using voice and video, but they can host and join Webex video conferencing meetings from the Jabber app itself.
The VDI landscape is complex. It requires a mix of thin-client operating systems plus a variety of video and audio drivers to make real-time media work. We have architected the app to support almost every flavor of thin-client operating systems including Windows, Windows Embedded, Windows Thin PC, Windows 10 IoT, eLux, HP ThinPro and Ubuntu, working with both Citrix and VMWare VDI environments.
Now we’re leveraging our expertise and taking this to the next level to provide an even more native meetings experience. We’re working to develop the Webex Meetings VDI client, bringing together our learnings from Jabber and the new Webex. In fact, the Webex Meetings VDI client keeps media on the edge, eliminates network bandwidth usage, and lowers data center compute costs while delivering superior real-time audio and video quality. Not bad.
On top of that, the underlying technology of the Webex Meetings VDI client is proven. Organizations, including some of the world’s largest financial institutions, have chosen to deploy Cisco’s VDI technologies. They tell us that our solution gives them the security and management of the virtual desktop environment while delivering best-in-class media quality and industry-leading collaboration to their users.
VDI continues to be an important element of Cisco’s collaboration software suite. We are committed to continuing to enhance our VDI solution to deliver a first-class experience for real-time media communications. Stay tuned.
The COVID-19 situation has forced many companies to allow their employees to work from home. Of course, VMware offers a great solution to accomplish this with the VMware Horizon platform solution(s). End-users can access their virtual desktops from home from any device, anywhere and are then able to start working with their company apps.
Working from home usually involves working (a lot) with online meetings. Cisco WebEx Teams is a very popular tool to do this. In some cases, end-users will use WebEx Teams within their virtual desktop.
Because end-user experience is very important in any virtual desktop environment, WebEx Teams offers a way to redirect the video content to the end-user’s client system (endpoint), which will not only give the end-user a better user experience, it also reduces the load within the virtual desktop session and therefore on the underlying ESXi host.
The client system will actually play the video content and the end-user will get far better audio and video experience.
In this blog post, I will show you how to configure this feature, specifically for VMware Horizon virtual desktops.
Virtual Desktop requirements
Before I continue, it worth mentioning that everything below is also described at the Cisco Deployment Guide web page.
First, go to https://www.webex.com/downloads/teams-vdi.html and download the Host Installer.
Next, install the Host Installer package, WebexTeams.msi, in the VDI image. You can use the following commands to do this:
Cisco Webex Teams Citrix
- Persistent VDI: msiexec /i WebexTeams.msi ALLUSERS=1 ENABLEVDI=1 AUTOUPGRADEENABLED=0 /quiet /norestart
- Non-persistent VDI: msiexec /i WebexTeams.msi ALLUSERS=1 ENABLEVDI=1 AUTOUPGRADEENABLED=0 ROAMINGENABLED=1 /quiet /norestart
As you can see, the most important setting is ENABLEVDI=1. If you just simply double-click the MSI this option is not used and redirection will not work.
The other important setting is ROAMINGENABLED=1 for non-persistent VDI. If this argument is specified, then the roaming database (the “spark_roaming_store.db” file) is stored in the end-user’s roaming directory (AppDataRoaming). Otherwise, the roaming database is stored in AppDataLocal. This argument must be accompanied by ALLUSERS=1, otherwise the ROAMINGENABLED argument is ignored.
Client system (Endpoint) requirements
The below instruction is for Windows-based endpoint devices.
Again, go to https://www.webex.com/downloads/teams-vdi.html. This time, download the Thin-client Installer.
You can just double-click the MSI and install with default settings, or use the following command-line:
- msiexec /i WebexTeamsVDIClient.msi /quiet /norestart
Important things to note:
- The redirection only works with accessing the virtual desktop via the Horizon Client. Do not use a browser session.
- Always first install the Horizon Client on the endpoint device, then the WebEx Teams client.
- WebEx Teams always detects the Citrix client first. If only using VMware Horizon, un-install the Citrix agent from the endpoint device.
- The WebEx Teams client and Horizon Client must be the same architecture; 32-bit or 64-bit but not a mix of the two.
- Horizon Agents 7.10 and newer are supported.
- Unfortunately, there is no macOS client installer just yet… You can only use the clients that are specified in the previous screenshot.
Testing the solution
You can verify if the redirection is working by checking the Health Checker option in the Help menu. This option must show a connected status for the Virtual Channel. If you are missing a requirement, the Virtual Channel does not have connected status, or isn’t there at all.
Webex Schedule A Meeting
During my tests I was using a 2vCPU, 4GB memory Windows 10 virtual desktop and I was testing with one other colleague in the WebEx Teams session. With redirection enabled, We noticed the video was presented in a higher resolution and the sound was much clearer as opposed to not using redirection. We also noticed the CPU and memory usage dropped by 10% and 200MB when using redirection, this was of course because the video content was offloaded/redirected to the endpoint device.