Is there life after HP Anyware?

Back in April this year, HP delivered the not entirely welcome news that they were going to discontinue the HP Anyware product. New licences could not be purchased after May, with existing customers able to upgrade or add licences until October 2027 and the final end of life point for all licences and support being October 2029.

HP Anyware will be deeply woven into a studio's infrastructure, with a connection broker checking who users are and routing them to the right machine, SSO and SAML login flows tied into your identity provider, and licensing servers and configurations spread across on-site and cloud locations. HP Anyware customers will be trying to figure out what life after Anyware looks like.

HP will continue to offer a solution, reverting to a form of RGS previously available – add Leostream if you want to add a broker - but there’s a fairly long list of alternatives you could use as a replacement. The question is which of these are suitable production alternatives. Two leading contenders emerge in the shape of Nice DCV (licenced and re-branded as Amazon DCV for use inside ECS) and Parsec.

We thought it might be interesting to share a customer journey on this subject, so we turned to friend of Escape, Barry Zubel. Barry is Director of IT at Lighthouse Games, a AAA games development studio based in Leamington Spa. Although rooted squarely in the games dev sector today, Barry has also worked across post-production and VFX as well and is widely experienced with the challenges of remote graphics.  

Barry was working for a post‑production facility when COVID shut the world down. Like everyone in tech, he needed a solution for remote working, and he initially turned to RGS, or ZCentral Remote Boost as it was called then. It was free, bundled with the HP workstations the facility already had, software-based and quick to deploy. It generally worked well, but the DI team needed better colour accuracy than RGS gave them, so he layered in Teradici, just for that team. Escape provided the host card that sits in the workstation itself and handles the encoding, while a small box on the user’s end, called the zero client, decodes it and displays the result; there’s no PC required at that end at all.

“The zero clients were absolutely brilliant,” recalls Barry. “We could literally just tell someone to take the zero client home, plug it in, and we knew it would work.” The hardware-based solution was smart under pressure too, recovering gracefully after connectivity issues instead of getting stuck at low quality. A generic third-party connection broker, Leostream, came into the picture later, mainly to sit in front of the Teradici setup, removing the need for a VPN and giving the team single sign-on into their domain controllers. The setup ran well through COVID and long after.

Teradici wasn’t particularly bandwidth efficient, Barry admits. “But that’s not necessarily what you wanted. You wanted quality. That’s why you’d go for the Teradici solution. You wanted that end representation of quality to be really, really good.”

When he later moved to Lighthouse Games, Barry had a very different remote access problem to solve. The studio was looking for a permanent office and meanwhile people worked from home on their own machines. But Barry was in the enviable position of being able to completely design an entire facility from scratch.

“We knew we were going to be a hybrid office when we finally got going,” he says. “So the question was what’s the best way to manage our workstations in a hybrid environment? Is it to still have them on desks? That’s when I revisited Teradici because at that point zero clients would have been incredible. We could have rack-mounted a whole bunch of workstations in a data centre somewhere, given everyone zero clients.”

But by then Teradici had moved to focus on software, it discontinued the host card solution, and soon afterwards Teradici and RGS were folded together into what became HP Anyware. For Barry, this was a real loss; he still considers the zero clients the best part of the whole setup.

Once Lighthouse had a base and moved to hybrid working, Barry evaluated remote desktop solutions such as NoMachine and Splashtop Streamer – “neither of those really had the graphics fidelity we were looking for” – as well as Windows’ own RDS, which performed well but couldn’t hold the frame rate a games studio needed. He also looked at HP Anyware, and Parsec, a SaaS app hosted by Unity.

Every artist in the building works from a calibrated monitor, and Barry treats colour accuracy as seriously at Lighthouse as he did in post. Since there’s no way to guarantee what monitor someone’s using at home, “we need to be sure that the colour that we’re putting out is right”. Both Anyware and Parsec held up well on that front, which is part of why the final call came down to controller support rather than image quality.

“Our game is designed to be played with a gamepad, and our gamepad of choice happens to be a Microsoft Xbox controller, which Anyware doesn’t support,” Barry informs me. Even though he admits it’s at a higher price point than Anyware, Parsec won out at Lighthouse on gamepad support, 60fps responsiveness, dual 4K and USB pass-through.

HP Anyware got one more shot though, this time in Lighthouse’s audio suites. “The sound quality was amazing,” Barry says. “It beat Parsec left, right and centre.” But the two-broker setup and a login flow that made users authenticate three times eventually wore him down: “Having to log in three times is just a real pain,” he says.

After six to nine months, those rooms moved to Parsec too.

I asked Barry the obvious follow-up: if he left games tomorrow and landed back in VFX or post, would he just deploy Parsec again? His answer was no. Parsec suits a games studio’s needs well, but “wouldn’t necessarily suit as well for a visual effects company. It is on the pricier side as well.” He’d start over: look at the whole market again, assess it against that studio’s actual workflows, and let the answer come from there rather than from what worked last time. And he adds: “You should reevaluate your tools regularly, because there are very smart people coming up with very smart solutions all the time.”  

Sage advice. Barry makes a persuasive case for Parsec in games dev, and here at Escape we’re leaning toward Nice DCV as being the best way forward for VFX.  With AV1 and Wayland support for Linux, customers can benefit from an improved, more modern architecture with multi-viewport capabilities and better performance.  Nice DCV also has a free broker and pool management tool with local licence deployment making TPN compliance and dark sites a reality again.  

Parsec, Nice DCV and Leostream are all available from Escape Technology. For further advice on how to transition your remote graphics pipeline, book a call.

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