VDI is good for every organization but not every end point!

I attended Microsoft Management Summit 2011 this year (MMS). The event was hosted in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. A great Microsoft event that, of course, showed all the ins en outs about a wide range of new (versions) of System Center products. Besides that, this year MMS2011 also included interesting sessions on RDS and VDI. I had to attend these of course! Thought I'd devote a blogpost on it.

On the very last day of MMS (the day after the closing party) I attended a session called VDI, RDS, TS, Windows 7 – How to Determine and Manage What Your Users Need by Tim S. Benjamin, he’s an Account Technology Strategist at Microsoft. A really good session! Very different from other MMS sessions, less focused on pure technology, but more on functionality and real life examples.

He shows the slide below, that is so basic, but yet so true.

RDS is so much more scalable and manageable then VDI. Users generally don’t care about VDI. Most of the time, they will not even see the difference between a Win7 VDI and a Win2008R2 RDS session. Do you? Below a slide that Tim Benjamin showed. Of course, as admins we know that the slide on the left had the server managent icon in the taskbar, so that must be Win 2008R2. But you have to admit, they look very much alike!

Research results in the following number: RDS have over 5 times more scalability over VDI. Besides that, < 20% of your users actually needs VDI. So can VDI and RDS reside in one environment? Of course! And you should. The following slides show the steps to determine who of your users really need VDI. For other users, use RDS!

So where does that leave VDI? I’m not saying RDS is always a better solutions then VDI. But, and I quote from Tim Benjamin:  VDI is good for every organization but not every end point!

During sessions at MMS, it was also good to see that Microsoft people on more than one occasion mentioned Quest (in particular vWorkspace) to extend RDS or VDI. During one of the sessions I used twitter to announce this extension to the rest of the attendees at that session (MMS offered great support for twitter using session-specific hashtags).  The tweet got retweeted lots of times. I personally have had the opportunity to test vWorkspace. I really like the way it extends the native RDP functionality from Microsoft. So it was good to see Microsoft referred to it as well!

And to conclude, a create quote from Gartner that is very much true as well:

“Virtualization without good management is more dangerous than not using virtualization in the first place.”

                Thomas Bittman, Analyst, Gartner

How to enable and test RemoteFX on RDSH

As a followup on my previous post about Remote FX for RDSH, and with SP1 for both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 being available for download let’s see if we can get a basic RemoteFX for Remote Desktop Session Host running!

As a quick recap, what is RemoteFX in a nutshell? RemoteFX is not a standalone product from Microsoft. It’s a set of RDP technologies that is added to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.

“.. With Microsoft RemoteFX, users will be able to work remotely in a Windows Aero desktop environment, watch full-motion video, enjoy Silverlight animations, and run 3D applications – all with the fidelity of a local-like performance when connecting over the LAN. Their desktops are actually hosted in the data center as part of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or a session virtualization environment (formerly known as Terminal Services)..”

RemoteFX for VDI has been the most heard combination but RemoteFX on RDSH can actually give more benefits then you might suspect. Quick reminder of a blogpost from Brian Madden on this:

“…In the case of a Terminal Server running RemoteFX, you'll actually have an increase in CPU usage on the server since you can't offload the RemoteFX encoding to the GPU. (The exact amount of the increase will vary depending on your workload.) However, the actual traffic over the network will decrease since you're spending more effort on the host encoding and compressing the traffic. You'll also typically end up with a better user experience because of this! (That's right! A Terminal Server running RemoteFX with the CPU-based encoding will typically provide a better overall user experience than a non-RemoteFX RDP session!)…”

So, lets get started…What are the minimum requirements in this test-setup? I used the following virtual machines:
- Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain Controller
- Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 RD Session Host
- Windows 7 SP1 client to run the RDP session on

So after setting up the basic stuff we have the domain running and have added the machines to it. We have configured the RD Session Host with the appropriate roles and created a group to allow them connections via RDP. As said, we need SP1 to enable RemoteFX on the RD Session host. Before running SP1 the option “configure RemoteFX” simply isn’t available in the Policy (see below)

 So let’s get that SP1 running! Updating it is pretty straight forward, we download ISO, run the setup and after accepting some license terms we hit Install.

And after the reboot we’re up & running

And there we have the new options in the policy:

Now let’s take our Windows 7 client to SP1 as well, same procedure as previously.

Now let’s enable and configure RemoteFX for the RD Session Host server:

To enable RemoteFX compression

1. Log on to RDSH-SRV as a member of the local Administrators group.
2. Click Start, click Run, type gpedit.msc and then click OK.
3. Navigate to Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Remote Desktop Services\Remote Desktop Session Host\Remote Session Environment.

Double-click Configure RemoteFX, click Enabled, and then click OK..

After a quick reboot of the RD Session Host to make sure the policy applied, we open up a session to the Windows 7 client and open up a Remote Desktop Client. We set the experience to LAN (10 Mbps or higher).

We enter the name to the RD Session Host server and hit connect. We’re now connected to the RD Session Host server with RemoteFX enabled. But…how can we make sure of this?

We open up the eventlog and we enable Analytic and Debug Logs

And then browse to

Application and Services\Logs\Microsoft\Windows\RemoteDesktopServices-RemoteDesktopSession Manager.

• If the computer is connected to the RD Session Host by using RemoteFX for Remote Desktop Session Host, Event ID 1000 will be shown.
• If the RemoteFX hardware compression was used, Event ID 1001 will be shown.

To conclude, we can configure the experience index for RemoteFX connections by using the following policy settings:

Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Remote Desktop Services\Remote Desktop Session Host\Remote Session Environment.

Enable Optimize visual experience when using RemoteFX.

In the Screen capture rate (frames per second) box, click Highest (best quality), and then click OK.
Select the Enabled option.
In the Screen Image quality box, click Highest (best quality), and then click OK.

A reboot of the RDSH server to apply the settings and we’re done!

Related articles and blogs:
* http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817595(WS.10).aspx
* http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2011/03/03/can-you-connect-to-a-terminal-server-via-remotefx-yes-here-s-what-you-need-to-know.aspx
* http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817602(WS.10).aspx
* http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817578(WS.10).aspx

RemoteFX to connect to Remote Desktop Session Hosts

Interesting post by Brian Madden about RemoteFX on Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services). We've been hearing about RemoteFX for some time now. In most cases it was all about Windows 7 VM's running on a Hyper-V environment in scenarios where VDI was used. Brian Madden shines a light on RemoteFX in combination with Remote Desktop Session Hosts. Some Snippets below.

For the full article see here: Can you connect to a Terminal Server via RemoteFX? Yes!

"...On the plus side, Microsoft has announced that certain partners will eventually release host-side hardware-based RemoteFX encoder cards that will offload the RemoteFX encoding. Those cards will work with both RemoteFX for Win7 VDI VMs on Hyper-V and Terminal Servers with no GPUs. Microsoft isn't talking about those cards too much today, but we can assume that they'll both lower the overall CPU load and provide a better overall user experience..."

"...In case you're wondering, the unofficial reason that RemoteFX will work with a Terminal Server natively is actually related to Microsoft MultiPoint Server. The story is that in order to get the ASIC-based MultiPoint thin client cost point as low as possible, Microsoft had to enable RemoteFX for Terminal Server. (MultiPoint is based on Terminal Server.)..."