I've been experimenting with a brand-new ESXi server that IT is testing, with various View clients as well as zero-clients like the 10ZiG V1200-QP. The 10ZiG in particular is hooked up to four 1920x1200 monitors, rotated into portrait orientation because it works better for me as a developer.
We actually have two ESXi servers, one with a K1 and the other with a K2 GRID card. But right now we're just testing bog-standard Windows 7 Office 2010 applications (Excel in particular), video, Chrome browsing, etc. In fact, I've had IT deactivate the GRID cards in my VM as they were causing some issues with monitor detection. Also, at home I have a 4K monitor that the GRID outright doesn't support.
I've been wrestling with IT trying to convince them that PCoIP performance should allow for at least smooth 1080p video playback (YouTube, say) and Excel scrolling at 30 fps. But right now all we seem to have achieved with View 6.1.1 is 24-30 fps for a single 1080p video in Chrome. Opening two such videos causes the fps to drop by half (15 fps each).
Even worse, Excel scrolling across four monitors is in the low single-digit fps. Our five-year-old desktops can easily run four 1080p videos while scrolling the same Excel session at butter-smooth frames per second.
Despite the server being on gigabit Ethernet (soon-to-be 10gbe though) and there only being three VMs currently set up on the ESXi server -- with only myself running full-time with 8 vCPU = 8 physical cores -- I can only ever push PCoIP TX transmit rate to about 125 mbps. Moreover, the pcoip_win32_server.exe process never exceeds 1/8 = 13-15%, i.e. "single-threaded" on my 8-vCPU VM. After a bit of kerfuffle when we first set up the ESXi server, we no longer see PCoIP packet loss.
Is this the sort of maximum performance one expects out of a bleeding-edge ESXi setup? We're not the typical VDI customer in the sense that we genuinely will dedicate at least eight vCPU to each user with no over-provisioning, 16GB+ of RAM, etc. We were trying to see whether this could replace powerful desktops at least in terms of native responsiveness in Office applications and YouTube 1080p video, but so far this is falling dramatically short.
Am I being crazy to think a top-end ESXi setup couldn't replace a multi-monitor desktop?