Introducing the Lync VDI Plugin

The Lync VDI plugin is a brand-new component for Lync 2013, and was created to provide an audio and video experience for a Lync client in a VDI session that matches the experience of a locally installed client. To support this, the VDI plugin uses media redirection, in which the encoding and decoding of media are offloaded from the datacenter and handled directly by the thin client or access device, using the client’s local resources. Other nonmedia features of Lync, such as IM, Presence, and desktop sharing, are still executed from within the virtual desktop.

Prior versions of the software, such as Lync 2010, had several inherent limitations that were presented when the Lync media workloads were virtualized. For example, note the peer-to-peer audio communication scenario depicted in Figure 27.1, in which one user is running Lync 2010 locally on a desktop, and the second user is running Lync 2010 within a VDI client. Unlike in a standard peer-to-peer audio session using two locally installed clients, the media stream for the VDI desktop user is sent and received from the datacenter, as opposed to the user’s location. This results in higher bandwidth usage at the datacenter, limits audio and video conferencing capabilities, reduces the scalability of the server, and frequently results in a poor media experience for the user.

Figure 27.1. Peer-to-peer communication with VDI using Lync 2010.

In contrast, Figure 27.2 shows the same peer-to-peer communication, but this time using Lync 2013 along with the VDI plugin. With this set of components, audio and video originate and terminate at the plugin running on the thin client, while the signaling traffic continues to use the VDI desktop in the datacenter. This results in minimal bandwidth consumption between the end device and the datacenter, enables all conferencing capabilities, and provides a significantly better media experience for the user. An additional benefit that results from this media redirection is that Lync server scalability improves, as the CPU-intensive media processing is offloaded to the client for each VDI user.

Figure 27.2. Peer-to-peer communication with VDI using Lync 2013 and the VDI plugin.