Availability Anywhere Part 15 — TCP over Serial Port

This is the fifteenth part of the Availability Anywhere series. For your convenience you can find other parts in the table of contents in Part 1 – Connecting to SSH tunnel automatically in Windows

You can’t forward a named pipe between the host and the guest VM, but we can forward the named pipe as a serial port to the VM. So the host writes to the named pipe, and the VM reads from the serial port. Let’s see the server now:

And here is the benchmark:

It works, but slows down linearly with the size. Why? That’s because the serial port has a max bandwidth (that we call baud rate). Here it is 115200 (around 112 kBps). While this works much faster for small packets, this won’t give a decent performance for RDP with bigger bandwidth requirements.

Can we do better? One solution would be to emulate a COM port that has a bigger bandwidth. However, I don’t know a solution yet.