Amazon WorkSpaces provides a persistent, cloud-based desktop experience that can be accessed from a variety of devices including PC and Mac desktops and laptops, iPads, Kindle Fires, and Android tablets.

Support for PCoIP Zero Clients

Today we are making WorkSpaces even more flexible by adding support for PCoIP zero clients. WorkSpaces desktops are rendered on the server and then transmitted to the endpoint as a highly compressed bitmap via the PCoIP protocol.

Zero clients are simple, secure, single-purpose clients that are equipped with a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals. The clients use a dedicated PCoIP chipset for bitmap decompression and decoding and require very little in the way of local software maintenance (there is no operating system running on the device), making them a great match for Amazon WorkSpaces.

You can use any zero client device that contains the Teradici Tera 2 zero client chipset. Currently, over 30 hardware manufacturers provide such devices; check Teradici’s supported devices list for more information.

Getting Started

In order to connect your existing zero clients to Amazon WorkSpaces, first verify that they are running version 4.6.0 (or newer) of the PCoIP firmware.

You will need to run the PCoIP Connection Manager authentication appliance in a Virtual Private Cloud. The Connection Manager is built on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and is available as an HVM AMI. It brokers the authentication process and enables the creation of streaming sessions from WorkSpaces to the clients, thereby offloading all non-streaming work from the clients. The Connection Manager must be run in the VPC that hosts your Amazon WorkSpaces endpoint.

To learn more about this important new AWS feature, read the PCoIP Zero Client Admin Guide.

— Jeff;