On Wednesday the 11 of March, we chose to give all artists the possibility to work from home. Our timeline was to have this ready in less than 20 hours. Our technical partner Hovedkvarteret, had the responsibility to setup VPN users for all artists, while my responsibility where to deploy and set up the workstations for remote access.

Everyone got the possibility to work from home, so its a vast range from animators and editors to light artists and line producers. So Windows Remote Desktop was out of the question, Teamviewer would not work, basically all the usual suspects where off the table. As we had the Z Workstations from HP, we had free licenses of HP RGS. We decided that now where the time to give it a go and deploy it to all. I used the HP RGS Optimizing performance whitepaper as my reference for the tech setup and design.

First: the VPN setup.

In Norway, we have pretty good fiber connections around, so latency should not be a problem. The reference stated that <20 ms will give the artist no visible difference from the local system, so that’s our goal.

PING TO L2TP VPN GATEWAY (base) andreass-air:~ aanerud$ ping XXX.qvistenXXX.no

PING vpn.qvisten.no (185.35.XXX.64): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 185.35.XXX.64: icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=4.614 ms PING WITH L2TP VPN TO WORKSTATION (base) andreass-air:~ aanerud$ ping stasjon83.qvisten.no

PING stasjon83.qvisten.no (10.1.1.83): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 10.1.1.83: icmp_seq=0 ttl=128 time=5.548 ms

64 bytes from 10.1.1.83: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=5.861 ms

That was quite good. Now, each user got their L2TP credentials; this way, we can monitor everyone, from a security perspective, down to their latency. We can further down the line, enable IP restricting on a user level, and monitor the timestamp of any connection. We shall also limit only to allow RGS traffic.

Second: Intel® Active Management Technology.

I didn’t know much about the Intel AMT Platform before this project came to life. But since I’m going 100% remote, then I need total contoll so that I can handle operating system lockups or power interrupts.

I use this guide to setup AMT. From here on and now, this will be a must on any workstation I order. Seriously.

Third: HP Remote Graphics Software

Since we had free licenses for HP RGS included in all of our workstations, the decision to use this was quite simple.

At Qvisten Animation, our deployment process is trough PDQ Deploy, so first, I deployed to all HP Workstations the RGS Sender

SenderSetup64.exe /z”/autoinstall /agreetolicense”

Secondly, I deployed the VMouseSetup.exe.

Both installed within 2 minutes per workstation, and we were operational.

Fourth: Make documentation

The documentation is in into two phases, one for the VPN Setup and one for the artists to install and setup the HP RGS.

Our Studio Internet connection is only 1Gbit. Therefore when we built the documentation, we had to make sure the artists chose the right quality. I headed back to the HP RGS Optimizing performance whitepaper and found two main factors that we enforced.

One

Enable HP Velocity. This improves the HP RGS user experience by addressing common network bottlenecks, such as packet loss, network latency, and WiFi congestion.

Two

Enable Adaptive image quality. When Adaptive image quality is enabled, RGS gradually degrades the image quality down to the Minimum image quality setting (from 0–100) anytime the updates-per-second value falls below the Target update rate(from 0–30 updates per second).

Three

If the artist has limited available network bandwidth, we consider using AVC compression. This will give an adequate performance compared with standard HP3 compression.

Final notes, nothing is perfect.

For some artists, we still consider switching to Teradici, as of their vast Wacom support, and Teradici does even seem to be a tiny bit better on latency.

HP RGS does support tablets and pens, but we struggle to get pressure sensitivity trough. We have raised a support ticket, and I hope to see some changes there quickly.