Deploying Dragon Medical One in a virtualized environment

Dragon Medical One can be deployed as a virtualized application or on a virtual desktop. The speech recognition is performed in secure Nuance data centers; Dragon Medical One has a small resource footprint on the application/desktop virtualization server.

Dragon Medical One virtualized environment architecture diagram

Supported virtualized environments

Dragon Medical One can be deployed in Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) and Omnissa (formerly VMware) Horizon/RDSH virtualized environments. For more information on supported virtualized environments, see the Dragon Medical One release notes.

Important

For security reasons, make sure that VDI channel encryption is enabled between client end points and VDI servers or virtual desktops. Disabling encryption in a virtualized environment can lead to confidential data being exposed. Encryption is enabled by default.

Edit control visibility

This means the following:

  • If you are using a virtual desktop solution, where all target apps are installed and run locally in the virtual desktop, Dragon Medical One must be installed in the virtual desktop image.

  • If you are virtualizing applications that are accessed by a viewer or remote desktop application on a local workstation, make sure that Dragon Medical One and the virtualized applications are launched in the same remote session.

Nuance virtual extensions

High quality audio is required for accurate speech recognition. Regardless of the virtualization technology and architecture, you must be able to deliver audio from the client workstation/terminal to the Dragon Medical One app in the virtual environment.

The Nuance virtual extensions package provides custom audio channels to reduce the audio bandwidth requirements between the client end point and the virtualized application. The custom audio channels require 28 kbit/s for each user while they're dictating (native audio channels often require up to 1.4 Mbit/s).

Citrix, RDS and Omnissa environments: Dragon Medical One already integrates the server/virtual desktop component of the Citrix, RDS and Omnissa (formerly VMware) audio channels. Install the Dragon Citrix Client Audio Extension, Dragon RDS Client Audio Extension or Dragon Omnissa Client Audio Extension on the client PC.

Note

If the Dragon Citrix Server & Virtual Desktop Audio Extension is installed, we recommend you uninstall it unless it is still used by another product.

To allow the usage of Nuance audio channels in Citrix environments, you must update the Citrix policy settings. For more information, see the documentation included in the Nuance virtual extensions package.

Thin clients

To use the custom audio channel in a thin client environment, the client component of the corresponding Nuance virtual extension must be installed on the thin client. For more information on supported thin clients, see the Dragon Medical One release notes.

Backward compatibility

The server/virtual desktop components of the Nuance virtual extensions are integrated in Dragon Medical One. The Nuance virtual extensions are designed to be backward-compatible from Dragon Medical One to the client end point. This means that you can run newer versions of Dragon Medical One in your virtual environment and they work with older versions of the corresponding client end point extension with the following restrictions:

  • New versions of Dragon Medical One are backward-compatible with the corresponding end point virtual extensions for up to one year.

  • It is recommended to upgrade the client end point extension to the latest version.

Microphone controls

The Nuance virtual extensions package provides custom PowerMic control channels to redirect PowerMic button presses to the virtualized Dragon Medical One instance.

Citrix, RDS and Omnissa environments: Dragon Medical One already integrates the server/virtual desktop component of the PowerMic button channel. Install Dragon PowerMic Citrix Client Extension, Dragon PowerMic RDS Client Extension or Dragon PowerMic Omnissa/VMware Client Extension on the client PC.

Note

If the Dragon PowerMic Citrix Server & Virtual Desktop Extension is installed, we recommend you uninstall it unless it is still used by another product.

Redistributable packages for Philips and Grundig devices are also available.

For more information, see the documentation included in the Nuance virtual extensions package.

Server runtime requirements

Bandwidth

Audio transmission between the end point and the virtualized application/virtual desktop: If the Nuance custom audio channel is used, expect 28 kbit/s per active user; if the native virtual audio channel is used, expect up to 1.4 Mbit/s per active user.

Audio transmission between the virtualized application/virtual desktop and the Dragon Medical system: Expect 80 kbit/s per active user.

Latency

Network latency between the client PC and the virtualized application/virtual desktop must not exceed 50 ms.

Network latency between the virtualized application/virtual desktop and the Dragon Medical system must not exceed 200 ms.

Latency requirements

Memory

The Dragon Medical One app’s memory usage, when in use, will fluctuate (based on user behavior and Microsoft Windows memory management behavior). For sizing and planning purposes we estimate memory utilization of 220 MB (full working set), of which approximately 70 MB (shared working set) are shared between all instances of the SoD.exe process on the same machine – the real physical memory impact therefore is approximately 150 MB per instance.

When Dragon Medical One is in standby mode, the memory usage increases by approximately 32 MB on the client end point in virtualized environments (if the Nuance custom audio channel is used) and by approximately 15 MB in local environments, compared to when the microphone is turned off.

CPU

Due to the many factors that can have an impact on CPU usage (processor speed, number of cores assigned to a given virtual instance, etc.), exact guidelines can't be given. In general, the CPU requirements for the virtualized sod.exe executable are very low. As Dragon Medical One leverages Nuance’s cloud-based speech recognition services, the local client performs very light-weight duties such as streaming speech and inserting recognition results.

With modern multi-core CPU architecture and provided that a given virtual session has been assigned at least one core, Dragon Medical One consumes between 1% and 3% of the available CPU per user session while the user is dictating.

When Dragon Medical One is in standby mode, the CPU usage increases by approximately 5% in local environments compared to when the microphone is turned off; it does not increase in virtualized environments (if the Nuance custom audio channel is used).

Deployment options

The following options are available to deploy Dragon Medical One in a virtual desktop/application environment:

  • Deploy Dragon Medical One using the Windows Installer (MSI package).

  • Deploy Dragon Medical One via XCOPY deployment (manually copy the package to the destination path).

Logging

In a virtual desktop/application environment, we recommend configuring a user-specific folder as the log file location; for example, %APPDATA%.

If you deploy Dragon Medical One using the Windows Installer, you can specify the location of the log file via the LOGFILEPATH parameter. For more information, see: Windows Installer.

If you deploy Dragon Medical One via XCOPY deployment, you can specify the location of the log file in the log4net section of the SoD.exe.config file (use the following syntax to specify environment variables: ${APPDATA}):

<appender name="TheSoDAppender" type="log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender">

<param name="File" value="${APPDATA}\SoD.log"/>

For more information, see: Logging.

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