Figure 5 shows a virtual desktop connection using PCoIP over port 4172. The Windows Registry, showing the protocol in use.Īlthough I've been using Blast Extreme to connect to my virtual desktops, these techniques will also show PCoIP and RDP connections. A screen capture of the Registry Editor is shown in In this case, I connected to my desktop using Blast Extreme. Use 'Regedit' to search for the text string 'ViewClient_Protocol,' and this will show the protocol being used. View also tracks which protocol is being used in the Windows registry. Network connections for various protocols. This, according to VMware's Horizon 7 port diagram poster from which a snippet is shown in Figure 3, is what Blast Extreme uses to make connections.

The output of the netstat command is shown in Figure 2, which shows that my virtual desktop has established a connection from the DirConWin701 (IP address 10.0.0.111) to the virtual desktop (IP address 10.0.0.139) over port 22443. They include observing which ports are being used or by looking at ephemeral entries in the desktop's Windows register.įor example, if I connect to a virtual desktop named 'DirConWin701' using a View client on my laptop using the Blast Extreme protocol, I could run 'netstat' to see which ports are being used. If you don't have access to the View Administrator Web client, or are using the View Direct-Connection Plugin (see my article for more on View Direct-Connection) which doesn't use a View Administrator Web client, there are other routes you can take to ascertain which protocol is being used. Figure 1.The Horizon Administrator Web Client. The easiest way in View to see which protocol is being used with a virtual desktop is with the View Administrator Web client: under the 'Sessions' tab, you can see the remote protocol each desktop is running ( Display protocols can compress, deduplicate and perform other operations to minimize the amount of data between the virtual desktop and the endpoint device. Horizon View is VMware's virtual desktop product, and it supports three display protocols: PCoIP, Blast Extreme and RDP. A display protocol transfers the virtual screen of a virtual desktop to the physical screen(s) of an endpoint device it makes a huge difference in an end-user's experience. The other day a colleague asked me how she could find out which display protocol she was running on her Horizon View desktop.

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