Tech Insight - Microsoft Teams Optimization with Citrix

Citrix Tech Insight welcome to Citrix Tech Insight where we provide overviews of Citrix Technologies features and functions through technical overviews and visual walkthroughs in this Tech site video our Focus will be on Microsoft teams optimization with Citrix Das and Citrix virtual apps and desktops chances are you are delivering some form of unified Communications with Das the use of unified communication has exploded over the last four to five years especially when the coveted pandemic drove work from home remote learning telemedicine and so on this demand probably won't go away especially with economic headwinds which will prompt more remote meetings versus in-person so which one is the most dominant Microsoft teams this is according to a survey from Daz Leica Pro's EUC State of the Union and some more information we've seen from our own usage Telemetry there are more than 5 million daily active users for teams on Citrix but the same Telemetry shows us that only 80 percent of those are in optimized mode which is a concern so what is citrix's approach Citrix's Approach to Teams Optimization to optimizing Microsoft teams our HDX optimization for teams offloads the media rendering for both audio and video from the vdi host to the endpoint device offloading the media rendering reduces the workload on the virtualized infrastructure and improves the overall performance and scalability of teams in the virtualized environment our team's optimization is built into Das and Citrix virtual apps and desktops and is turned on by default via Citrix policy let's look at the architecture and what teams optimization looks like behind the scenes at the top of the diagram we have our vda within either our data center or public Cloud tenant below that is our user device running the Citrix workspace app after the user launches teams teams authenticates Office 365 and tenant policies are pushed down to the team's client and the relevant turn and signaling Channel info is relayed teams detects it is running in a vda and makes API calls to the Citrix code embedded in teams a secure websocket connection is open to the websocket service running on the vda loopback the websocket service runs as a local system account on session zero performing TLS termination and user session mapping the websocket agent now instantiates a generic virtual Channel by calling into Citrix HDX browser redirection service the HDX engine spawns a new process called the HDX teams.exe which is the webrtc engine used for teams and now hdxtteams.exe and teams have a two-way virtual Channel path and can start processing multimedia requests and when the user Begins the call Flow teams communicates with the team services in Azure and end-to-end signaling path is established with the target peer teams will ask HDX teams for a series of supported call parameters codex resolutions Etc this is known as sdp offer which are then relayed via the signaling path to team services in Azure and from there to the other Pier once sdp and Ice connectivity checks are completed srtp media will flow between hdxteens.exe and the other peer or Office 365 conference servers if it is a meeting Optimization Issues? so optimizing teams seems easy enough so what could possibly go wrong well it could be an old vda an old workspace client maybe someone tweaked the HDX policy and shut teams optimization off sometimes under powered thin clients could be an issue and even installing teams incorrectly into the base Das image can affect the end user experience you'd think after all this development all this Focus all the Innovation this issue would be solved but we continue to hear from Citrix customers and partners that delivering teams and other unified communication apps in Das is one of their biggest trouble spots and for the user if anything goes wrong the experience is inconsistent at best here's an example with Citrix HDX optimization for teams you get clear jitter-free video and clean crisp audio without Citrix HDX optimization the audio is less clear with dropouts video is in a lower resolution what you saw in the last example was The The "hairpin" effect, LESS PREFERRED all media flowing bi-directionally thru ICA Hairpin effect what that means is that the audio visual aspect is not rendering at the endpoint it's actually rendering on the dad's host and being pushed down the display in audio virtual channels now while we have great display in audio codecs there's a lot that can diminish The Experience being far away with high latency or bandwidth constraints obviously affects the experience in a negative way but think about the processing power it takes to deliver a high definition audio visual experience now that is taking place on the server host if it's a multi-session host that's loaded up you're hitting a resource bottleneck that affects everyone negatively so how can you as an Is Teams Optimized? administrator or an end user tell if you're running an HDX optimized team session there are a couple of options that do require manual intervention within the team's client simply going to about version displays the team's version and if it is running an HDX optimized mode this will be displayed in the version Banner another option check the endpoint to see if the a HDX RTC engine process is running there are other options available as well when troubleshooting teams optimization and the CTX link you see here is the best resource to use in this troubleshooting for teams optimization to work correctly The requirements for HDX Teams Optimization here's what is required starting with teams itself the minimum version needed is the current version minus seven months the delivery controller needs to be at version 1912 cu7 or later or if you're running Citrix Daz these customers since the infrastructure is managed and maintained by Citrix no versions to worry about there for the vdas version 1912 cu7 plus is required as well the requirements on the endpoint device side are essential as well Citrix workspace app 2203 or newer for Windows 2203 for Mac 2203 for Linux and the latest workspace app for Chrome OS are all required we often see that a user may connect from an old laptop with an old version of workspace app or even receiver installed maybe they've even connected with an HTML5 in a browser and the expectation is an optimized experience but today that's not supported and won't be the case in short use the latest or later Citrix components teams optimization should work out of the box if all these minimum requirements are met without setting any special HDX policies here's another consideration when you build your base Building your base image or static VM image you must make sure to follow a certain process this is outlined in detail in Citrix documentation as well as Microsoft's the big thing to consider is that by default teams installs into the user's app data folder in their profile obviously that's not where you want it unless it's a persistent desktop you can install teams in machine-wide mode which puts it into to the program files section and adds itself to the program section and control panel one other note teams will not auto update itself in machine wide mode so you will need to add that to part of your image maintenance procedures another thing to consider is profile management even with machine-wide install teams will Hammer the user profile so you will want to configure your user profile management with appropriate inclusions and exclusions and as I mentioned before if you're running the correct vda workspace and delivery controller teams optimization is on by default you must actually explicitly turn it off otherwise it's going to optimize teams experience so long as you are on a capable device remember when I mentioned the issues with the underpowered thin clients well our team's optimization now includes a feature to help with this first some background on how teams works we'll look at this in very simple terms when several attendees join a video call each endpoint reports up their Max capability as in video resolution the teams platform then sets the resolution to the lowest capable client you can see what happens four or five people join with high powered laptops and then someone joins in with an older underpowered device that's CPU bound the call experience goes down for everyone but with simulcast delivery multiple video resolutions will become available meaning the person on the underpowered device will get lower resolution without affecting everyone else the feature does require your team's tenant with Microsoft to be in the appropriate ring to make sure that you have the feature enabled on their side this demo starts with four devices in a team's call one of the devices is very old and very underpowered the performance monitor of that device is highlighted and it shows both CPU and GPU are pegged you can see how the streams from that device have slowed are running behind and making the call difficult for all parties involved this is without simulcast support for teams optimization turned on now we have simulcast enabled same exact devices the Improvement is obvious even though the offending device is very old and very underpowered actually not even supported as a sexually ready Thin Client the CPU and GPU are no longer completely pegged and the audio and video streams are able to keep up HDX Simulcast with simulcast enabled each client sends its AV stream in a resolution it can handle given its resources 720p 360p or with very underpowered devices 180p teams meeting servers then send out multiple streams sending the appropriate resolution for what each participant device can handle this will help with underpowered devices older client devices older think clients and low bandwidth situations so now let's answer the question what happens if you cannot run in optimize mode granted we don't have optimization support for certain devices like iPads or Android mobile devices can you see the issue here maybe you're using your Linux thing client and it works great fully optimized but then you head to your local coffee shop take out your iPad put in your Apple airpods and connect to your dad's desktop you open teams and you're in what we call fallback mode or media over ICA these Legacy HDX Technologies might be webcam redirection and client-side audio or microphone redirection so the peripherals are mapped to the vda and appear to teams as if they were locally attached to the virtual desktop this isn't always a bad thing in fact we've made some major improvements in bi-directional audio recently those generic or media over ICA improvements are important because some audio and video Solutions don't have optimization options to offload rendering to the endpoint so the takeaway is this when Citrix HDX optimization for Microsoft teams is configured correctly Citrix is going to provide a great teams user experience for your end users