Trimble Business Center

Is anyone currently/has experienced using TBC on a Virtual Desktop environment? 

The reason i'm asking is our IT personnel is looking at moving us to VDI.

Would like to get everyone's input on this? 

Hi Karen,

It will be interesting to see if and how VDI has improved from a few years ago. At that time company I was working with wanted to use Virtual Desktops. I was doing a lot of remote work and my experience then was that it didn’t work. The mouse movement was to slow and zooming in and out had way to much lag time. The guys in IT at the time tried giving me a lot of “virtual” resources but even with a fast internet on both ends it wasn’t workable. We tried doing it in-house also but the results were the same. When I discussed it with Trimble support it was noted at the time that CAD type work did not function with a VDI setup. I also ran it by other support resources and got the same answer. It seems to be a given that to work well requires a fast computer with a goodly amount of fast RAM and a higher end video card. I don’t think any of that is described as the usual VDI environment. I will say that everyone in the company that was using MS Office apps and other bidding programs didn’t seem to notice any issues.

Perhaps v5.X is working better with the latest Virtual Desktop servers. I know the IT folks called me a few weeks ago to see if I new how to speed some things up. I hope somewhere there are folks with better data.

We are currently experiencing the same result in VDI. The cursor could hardly keep up with the mouse speed and it's lagging. Thank you for sharing your experience. 

My company moved to nearly 100% VDI for all of our applications several years ago.  This includes TBC, ACAD, Microstation & ArcGIS which all run nearly as well as on a local desktop, but it took several years to get where we are today.  The growing pains of the VDI environment for our IT staff was and somewhat continues to be significant to optimize the performance.  The cursor lag you speak of, at least on our end was bandwidth related.  We now have direct fiber optic connectivity to our data center which houses all of our VDI servers.  Not sure this answers your question, but TBC can be run in a virtual environment, but to do so can be expensive and taxing on an IT department to get it done right.

It's good to know that it's possible. I will make sure to pass these inputs to our IT. Thanks.

Hi Karen, we are currently testing TBC on VDI and it works perfect. But it is not a program on VDI it is whole computer (full desktop solution) that is on VDI and that solution works. There is no lagging even with normal wifi connection.

I will relay this to our IT. Thank you.

Will you be able to tell me the specs you guys are using? 

We are using Cloud desktop from one danish IT company. For exact specs would not know.