Virtual PC Center (VPCC): The Benefits of Virtual PC with Telephony

NECs Virtual PC Center (VPCC) is a leading thin client solution that provides a secure computing platform for your enterprise data with significant multimedia capabilities. With VPCC, your desktop instantaneously and securely follows you throughout the enterprise. Both fixed desktop and portable laptop client solutions are possible.

Table of Contents
2 Traditional PCs Vs. Virtual PC 2 Previous Thin Client Solutions 3 Virtualizing the PC Desktop 3 PC Telephones 4 Telephony on a PC Desktop 4 Telephony on a Virtual PC 6 Conclusion

The VPCC product line includes the NEC US100 and NEC US110 Thin Client devices that drive the virtual PC experience on the desktop. The US model thin clients are unique because they offer a more complete Microsoft Windows experience for the user where other thin client solutions have failed. Combined with a monitor, keyboard and mouse, the US thin clients present a Windows environment through its simple system-on-a-chip leading-edge technologies. The solution completeness comes from two key features: a) multimedia acceleration (MMA) high-speed graphics and sound, and b) capable of being integrated with Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone systems so the phone extension automatically moves with you wherever you login to your PC session. For more information regarding multimedia high-speed graphics, please refer to our dedicated white paper on using MMA with NECs thin client computing solutions. This paper focuses on the second of these key features; that is, how to integrate VoIP solutions with thin client computing. It covers why telephony is not only supported on a virtual PC but also why virtual PCs can perform better than a traditional PC desktop solution for telephony support. Included in this review is a brief overview of how a virtual PC functions and the history of why previous thin client solutions are not able to provide telephony support.

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The Benefits of Virtual PC with Telephony

Traditional PCs vs. Virtual PC

Until recently, there have been huge functional differences between traditional PC desktops versus thin client desktop solutions. The chart below outlines the major characteristics of each:

Social Security Administration loses laptop with 200 persons records. It really worries me," she added. I mean, they could affect my whole life from this point on.
-Holly Reny, Office of Disabilities, SSA Traditional Desktop PC Strengths: Familiar OS environment Popular application support Fast display of graphic & multimedia content from applications Portability (laptops) Weaknesses: End-users manage their own computers Vulnerable to viruses & other threats Few data backups For many years, solution providers and IT managers have been trying to create a solution such that the strengths of the thin client desktop can be applied to the full functionality of the PC desktop. Therefore, NEC is introducing its new PC virtualization solution, the Virtual PC Center. Thin Client Desktop Strengths: Low- cost desktop devices Low support & services costs IT manages computers & applications Data backups with high availability & security No end-user downtime Weaknesses: Limited applications No multimedia capabilities No portability

Over 26 million Americans threatened by stolen laptops with their private information. The number of incidents has been astounding, topped by the theft of a laptop computer last May from the residence of a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs staff person; the computer contained millions of names, birth dates and Social Security numbers.
-Forbes

Previous Thin Client Solutions

If the virtual PC is so attractive, why havent previous thin client devices been used for PC desktops? Previous thin client solutions allow users to use a low-cost thin client device or terminal emulation on their PC desktop to run applications in the data center. The display content generated from the application is automatically transferred to the thin client display device. However, because the de-encoding of the multimedia files (video and sound) is accomplished on the server, the un-encoded multimedia content cannot efficiently reach the thin client device through existing network bandwidth even if fiber-optic cabling is used. For this reason, thin client solutions have not been able to provide 100% compatibility for general purpose PC desktop usage. NECs VPCC solution has moved multimedia decoding to the edge in the format of an enhanced thin client devices, the US100 and US110 Thin Client. Wyse, Hewlett-Packard and other vendors offer a thin client computing device, but none support hardware-based PC multimedia decoding on a low-cost device. This limits these users to only run applications that either do not require or only can handle very low-resolution multimedia. Some key applications that would not run on these solutions include all video and audio through an Internet browser, soft telephone capabilities, and movies or other audio/video applications.

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The Benefits of Virtual PC with Telephony

Virtualizing the PC Desktop

Once a low-cost thin client device can be used at the end-user workstation to provide a full Windows environment, the end-user application processing can be virtualized thereby consolidating the processing of multiple users PC activity on a few servers in the data center. This allows the enterprise to take advantage of the CPU processing capacity available on these servers. It is too expensive for each user to have their own server especially since the amount of processing utilized by each user on average is less than 3% of the servers capacity. Multiple users can now use the same server, but each with their own virtual user space. This maximizes the CPU processing capacity of a server while minimizing the amount of hardware required. The NEC VPCC solution has a number of advantages over the current thin client solutions: Full PC functionality emulation, including multimedia support for Windows. Full virtualization of user sessions on a single server. Efficient user session creation and management of the virtual user sessions. Complete solution of both the desktop and servers from one vendor.

PC Telephones
One of the most important tools in the workplace today is the telephone. No business can fully operate without a phone because verbal communication is one of the best and most efficient means to conduct business. For nearly the entire 20th century telephone systems were based on analog signals. Some kind of wire or wireless connection was required to pass voice signals in the form of waves between two devices that could translate the waves into recognizable sounds. Today, wave content has been converted into digital content. The end-devices have changed to convert digital content into the same familiar sound waves so that the conversation is recognizable by humans. Hybrid systems also exist so that an analog device can work with a digital device, as long as there is an encoder or decoder translating waves into digital content, and visa versa. Digital phone systems use an end-device that is basically a computer on the Internet. In order for a computer to communicate on the Internet, it needs an Internet Protocol (IP) number, so voice on the Internet with a digital telephone device is referred to as Voice over IP (VoIP).

Telephony on a PC Desktop
Since a desktop PC is a general purpose computing device, it too can be used as a telephone device. The telephone on a desktop PC, referred to as a soft phone, is simply a software program running like a telephone and in many cases, displayed on the PC with the familiar look of a telephone device. Some popular Internet websites have created a way to turn your PC into a phone using your Internet browser, or by installing their soft phone that communicates with the Internet just like your browser functions.
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The Benefits of Virtual PC with Telephony

In business environments, VoIP telephone systems are becoming more pervasive in order to reduce costs by utilizing the Internet as the primary network connection between users. You would expect that one way to reduce costs would be to start using the PC as the phone device in each office, but this hasnt been adopted yet. If the PC is so versatile and useful for so many office functions, why is the PC not a good device to use as a phone? The poor quality of service occurs if the PC is performing functions other than operating as a telephone. For example, if you are talking on the desktop PC VoIP phone and open an email or Microsoft Word document, the computer cannot convert digital sound into audible content while the files are opening. During this time the phone conversation basically stops, and in fact it sounds like you have a very bad connection. The more work you ask your PC to perform while you are trying to have a phone conversation, the more interruptions the phone service experiences. So instead of converting the PC into a VoIP phone, VoIP providers offer the familiar phone device that looks and functions just like an analog phone device. The only difference is that the VoIP phone device using the local area network (RJ45 plug) for its communication connection rather than a traditional phone line (RJ13 plug.) This simplifies office setup, and running cable within a building, as well as to reduce management and services to maintain the system. From the end-users viewpoint, the phone works the same with no added benefit.

Telephony on a Virtual PC
Until recently, soft phones could not function on the thin client device or in thin client architectures. This is because the sound media is converted into physical digital sound on the computer in the IT data center, which is a long distance from the users thin client device display and speakers. This is a problem even on a high-speed network because the actual sound content is many times larger than the super-compressed content transmitted digitally over the Internet. This would be like connecting a garden hose to a fire hydrant; very little of the data will actually reach the end-user.

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The Benefits of Virtual PC with Telephony

However, if the soft phone is running in a virtual PC, such as with the VPCC system from NEC, the soft phone data is not converted on the back-end server due to the filtering solution provided by NEC with its Virtual PC Center Virtualization servers. Instead, the voice data remains encoded and is efficiently transferred to the US100 or US110 thin client device over the network. The US100 and the US110 thin clients include the necessary codex for decoding video and sound content. In the case of the soft phone, the encoded sound is decoded by the US100 or US110 providing full voice quality.

The benefits of the VPCC solution with integrated telephony are: Very high quality of service for voice telephony using a soft phone, because the US100 and US110 thin client devices perform all the decoding of the sounds -- not the backend server. There is never an interruption of voice quality even if the PC is running at 100% CPU. Very low network bandwidth, since all sound traveling over the network is always encoded. 100% portability of the phone extension to any virtual PC workstation the user is logged-in; in other words, the phone extension travels with the user, even from a remote location if on a VPN.

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Conclusion
Telephony is an application that is paramount to any business organization. As the benefits of VoIP telephony solutions become more and more accepted in todays business, so will the use of the PC be desired to operate as the phone device. However, PC desktops inherently cannot be used as a high quality phone device since they cannot guarantee dedicated processing time to the conversion of digital content into sound when talking on the phone. The result is an interruption in the phone conversation and a very low quality of service. On the other hand, thin client solutions that support an end-device capable of multimedia support, such as the NEC US100 and US110 thin clients, can support VoIP phone device services with a high quality of service. The soft phone runs on the virtual PC desktop in the data center while the thin client device decodes sound wave used in the phone conversation. This efficient solution adds further benefits helping to move corporate and government organizations toward VoIP and virtual desktops PC using the NEC Virtual PC Center.

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