Fast and fluid audio/video experience with the new Lync and RemoteFX

Great announcement on the RDS blog by Shanmugam Kulandaivel, a senior program manager on the Remote Desktop Virtualization (RDV) team : Fast and fluid audio/video experience with the new Lync and RemoteFX This is great news as this covers vm-based scenarios as well as session (traditional terminal servers) !

"... One of the announcements that will particularly interest readers of this blog is the support for Lync audio and video in virtual machine-based and session-based desktop deployments. You can find more details in the section titled ‘Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Plug-in’ in this TechNet article. The RDV and Lync teams worked over the past year to help enable a seamless, fast, and fluid conferencing experience that works with the new Lync in Windows Server 2012 deployments by using RemoteFX..."

"...A key part of the new architecture is the RemoteFX Media Redirection API, which allows Voice over IP (VoIP) applications to natively integrate with RemoteFX, and enables transmission and rendering of audio and video content directly on the client side.

Some of the significant advantages of this approach include:

Audio and video performance similar to that of running Lync locally. Since a double hop of media content is avoided, even WAN users can have a great Lync conferencing experience.

Reduced bandwidth usage between the client and the data center because Lync media content is not sent from the server-based desktop anymore.

Improved server scalability because CPU intensive media processing happens on the client side..."

Source : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2012/07/24/fast-and-fluid-audio-video-experience-with-the-new-lync-and-remotefx.aspx