Poor Video Performance in vsphere 4.1 remote console after Xendesktop VDA is installed

When you build a Windows 7 XenDesktop image that is hosted on VMware vSphere 4.1 you will find that your gold image will perform as it should when using vSphere's remote console feature until you install the XenDesktop Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA). After the VDA is installed, your remote console session has poor video performance. On top of that when you launch a XenDesktop session using your Windows 7 image all the user gets is a black screen.

This is due to a conflict between the WDDM video driver that the XenDesktop VDA installs and the version that VMware tools installs. When VMware Tools 4.1 (Version 8.x) is installed the default video driver is set to the VMware SVGA 3D (Microsoft Corporation – WDDM) driver and when you install the XenDesktop VDA it replaces the VMware driver with the Citrix Display Driver (Citrix Systems - WDDM) as the default video driver. If you leave the XenDesktop WDDM driver installed the remote console in vSphere has very poor video performance which causes the mouse to be very choppy and not responsive. If you update the video adapter to use the VMware SVGA 3D driver then the remote console works correctly however your users will get nothing but a black screen when logging into XenDesktop. To resolve this driver issue try the following:

• Launch the vSphere client
• Open a remote session to your gold image machine
• If the XenDesktop VDA is installed uninstall it and reboot
• Open device manager and change the default VMware video adapter to use the VMware SVGA II driver and reboot (Driver is located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\Drivers\Video)
• Log back into your golden machine and confirm that video performance in the remote console works normally
• Now we need to install the VDA without the Citrix WDDM driver as outlined in CTX130851
  • Open a command prompt and browse to \\<VDA Installation files>\x64\XenDesktop Setup (Substitute x86 for x64 if you are using a 32-bit operating system
  • Run the following: XenDesktopVdaSetup.exe /NOCITRIXWDDM (This will install the VDA without the WDDM driver
  • After the install completes reboot the system
• Once the machine reboots log back in and open Device Manager
• Navigate down to the Display adapters and expand it
• You should now have two display adapters listed
  • Citrix Systems Inc. Display Driver
  • VMware SVGA II

This configuration will allow you to use the remote console feature of the vSphere client properly and allow users to launch a XenDesktop session successfully. The only gotcha that I have found so far is when I’m using the remote console  from time to time the session will freeze and you have to reset the virtual machine. Hopefully with the newer releases of vSphere the issue is resolved.