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Zoom Optimizes Meetings for VDI

Zoom is at the forefront of enabling organizations to capitalize on the growth and benefits of VDI with meeting, phone, chat, and webinar solutions.

4 min read

Updated on September 01, 2022

Published on April 17, 2020

In this blog

01 Traditional VDI challenges for meeting solutions - Jumplink to Traditional VDI challenges for meeting solutions
02 Top considerations in selecting a meeting solution for VDI - Jumplink to Top considerations in selecting a meeting solution for VDI
03 How Zoom optimizes meetings on virtual desktops - Jumplink to How Zoom optimizes meetings on virtual desktops

David Flores

Product Marketer

Market Insights states the global virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) market is expected to reach $5 billion USD by 2022. Enterprise organizations frequently adopt VDI for security and flexibility in managing and controlling desktops from a single centralized location. To enable successful collaboration, these organizations need a meeting solution that is optimized to perform well on VDI.

It has traditionally been a challenge for companies to deliver video meeting solutions on their VDI platform. Due to the inherent VDI architecture, meeting solutions have been difficult to implement at scale because of performance and latency issues. VDI requires significant network resources, which can result in slow connections and an overtaxing of server-side capabilities. These network constraints frequently lead to poor audio and video experiences. To be successful, IT teams had to carefully plan multimedia load distribution and network paths, leaving most with expensive on-prem video conferencing solutions — and their employees stuck in the dark ages of audio conferencing.

If you are looking for a video meeting solution that performs well on VDI, consider your organization’s use cases for video meetings, how different meeting solutions process media feeds, and how a vendor behaves in your VDI setup:

Use cases: Define your use case feature requirements for internal meetings, external communications, corporate training, and webinars. Understand how many people will be in your meetings and what their content sharing needs will be.
Client-side multimedia processing: Look for a solution that processes media on the thin-client side of the VDI environment to ensure reliability without creating major increases in network bandwidth. Zoom enables a reliable user audio and video experience without a big network overhaul because the data is directly routed to Zoom’s cloud service, as opposed to going through your internal data centers. Zoom automatically optimizes our routing based on the customer’s configuration.
A vendor with a partnership mindset: You will want a partner that will understand your unique environment, including your deployment (on-premise, hosted, or DaaS), if you’re running a persistent or nonpersistent environment, the hardware of your servers, thin-client performance, and your network bandwidth capabilities. Your vendor should also help guide your team through a deployment plan and proof of concept.

Zoom’s unique architecture is superior to other video solutions when it comes to bandwidth efficiencies, latency, and handling of packet loss. We will work with you to accurately forecast and benchmark the bandwidth demand that fits your software and delivery architecture roadmap.

Zoom’s VDI meeting and phone solutions are optimized to deliver exceptional experiences with quality audio and video on VDI from Citrix or VMware. Zoom has a single client for all VDI types of deployment, whether it's persistent or nonpersistent. The Zoom thin-client plugin renders video, and the virtual desktop renders everything else. Zoom optimizes the VDI client in several ways:

Zoom reduces the number of streams and the frame rate to put the least load possible on the host.
Zoom offloads media encoding and decoding, and overlays the video feed in the right place on the UI. For example, if a pop-up appears to prompt for recording approval, Zoom overlays it on the video feed.
All media that is being used locally on the thin client is sent directly to the Zoom cloud, with the security and SSO authentications delivered through the virtual desktop, increasing performance.

Zoom’s VDI meeting solution offers rich video resolutions of up to 1080p, desktop and app sharing, whiteboarding and annotation, and cloud recording with transcripts. Zoom has one single installer across clients for Citrix or VMware, and Zoom offers a rich set of integrations available to support various end-user and IT workflows. Zoom is at the forefront of enabling organizations to capitalize on the growth and benefits of VDI with virtual meetings, softphones, team chats, and webinar solutions. To learn more about Zoom and how it can transform meetings in your VDI environment, check out our support articles on getting started with VDI and VDI client features comparison. Or schedule a one-on-one demo with a Zoom product specialist today!