There is no modification needed to the Teams back-end, or any additional software pieces required to be installed on the VDA or endpoint, which is an improvement over the Skype for Business RealTime Optimization Pack.The solution is supported by both Microsoft and Citrix.Less HDX traffic will be consumed due to the way traffic is shaped with the optimized approach.Local peripherals such as your webcam and microphone will be automatically redirected into Teams.Other advantages of optimized Teams delivery: This shifts resource consumption to the endpoint, reducing impact on your VDAs, and shapes the Teams audio and video traffic in a much more optimized fashion because now media traffic flows point-to-point between clients or the Teams conferencing service in Microsoft 365. The optimized solution can be thought of as splitting the Teams client in two, with the user interface living inside of the VDA and the media rendering/engine running on the endpoint. This is made possible using the WebRTC media stack.
HDX Optimization for Teams allows you to deliver 720p high-definition video calls at 30fps through your Virtual Apps and Desktops solution. With generic delivery of Teams, the video and audio traffic “hairpins” from the user endpoint to the Citrix VDA and back to the endpoint, which degrades video and audio quality whilst placing high resource consumption load on the VDAs themselves. If you are familiar with delivering Skype for Business using the HDX RealTime Optimization pack, you’ll be aware of the term Generic delivery. Overview of how it works Generic delivery of Teams Troubleshooting HDX Optimization for Teams.Headset / Handset device requirements and Recommendations.Considerations, Known Issues, and Limitations.HDX Optimization for Teams diagram and call flow.To help achieve that, we can use HDX Optimization for Teams, jointly developed by both Citrix and Microsoft, to offload media processing to the endpoint itself. Given that many people are working from home and therefore using Teams to host one-to-one or multi-party calls, we need to make sure that the video and audio quality delivered via Teams is great and VDI or Session Based users do not take a performance hit whenever audio and/or video calls are taking place. Play a simple video on any device and you will notice that CPU first and foremost takes a hit, but times that by multiple users at once across shared Hypervisors and you can start to imagine the impact it may have on your Citrix deployments and the end user experience. Multimedia processing however can quickly send the end user experience south. This means that a lot of existing and also new Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Deployments are under scope for Teams deployment and consumption. With the increase of market share, it’s one of those applications that either you expect an organization to already be using or planning to deploy out to their environment sooner rather than later. Since early 2020 there has been massive growth in the number of active Teams users and organizations deploying Teams, to now more than 200 million monthly active users across the globe.