Video Conferencing in the Cloud

Cloud Optimization Tip 1

As our cloud customers are finding out, being in the cloud makes the work from home transition easier. However, that doesn’t mean their aren’t some optimizations that can help improve things. CIO will be continuing to explore many of these concepts in our webinar series and blog articles, but we also want to push out some of what we are learning with our cloud community at large. The first optimization is related to video conferencing.

Historically, our recommendation was always to do video conferencing outside of the cloud desktop because it was a resource hog (noisy neighbor problem) and the experience wasn’t as good as running it locally.

This works fine if you are doing a few video conferences a week, but becomes rather annoying if you are doing 3 a day. It’s a much simpler process to just click on your Outlook calendar video conferencing link and have everything work as opposed to cutting and pasting the link/meeting ID etc. between cloud and local desktops.

We are pleased to announce that if you are using Zoom for your video conferencing, there is an option that can help with this. Zoom has an optimization for the cloud which allows the “local hardware” resources to do the heavy lifting, but have the application experience run in the cloud. The result is a seamless experience running zoom in the cloud without the degraded video or resource usage.

To do this: 

    1. Install https://zoom.us/download/vdi/ZoomCitrixHDXMediaPlugin.msi on your local machine.
    2. Have the Zoom software installed on the gold image if it isn’t already.
    3. Zoom accounts
    4. Install a zoom add in on your cloud gold image. This will require a refresh which usually happens on Sunday. You can email us at support@ciosolutions.com with “Gold Image Zoom Optimization” in the subject to have this completed.
    5. We can determine this is done when zoom in the cloud sees your local speaker and mic hardware rather than the generic ones it normally sees. Don’t worry we know how to check this so you don’t have to.