RD Gateway Windows Server 2012 Capacity Planning

Microsoft has released a whitepaper for download about capacity planning for the RD Gateway running on Windows Server 2012.

RD Gateway Capacity Planning in Windows Server 2012.docx

“…Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) enables authorized remote users to connect to Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) accessible resources on the corporate network, from any Internet-connected device by using the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client. This whitepaper contains scalability results, testing methodologies, analysis, and guidelines for RD Gateway. It describes the most relevant factors that influence the capacity of a given deployment, methodologies to evaluate capacity for specific deployments, and a set of experimental results for different combinations of usage scenarios and hardware configurations…”

Source and download:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-ie/download/details.aspx?id=38798

RDS blog announcement:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2013/05/29/rd-gateway-windows-server-2012-capacity-planning.aspx

2000 Seat VDI Deployment Benchmark (By Dell & Microsoft)

A new Blog post on MSDN by the Microsoft RDV team how they recently partnered with Dell to build a 2000-seat VDI deployment (all pooled virtual desktops) at their Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) in Redmond.

“…The key idea of this architecture is that VDI compute and storage are per host; think of these as VDI pods, and you can just add more pods to host more users. The key advantage of such a design is that we only need high availability (HA) type storage for user docs and settings, and typically such an infrastructure already exists in an enterprise. If not, it can be built mostly independent of the VDI. And just to complete the picture, some shared storage might be required depending on your preference for HA configuration of back-end services such as SQL, although the VDI-specific services have application-level HA and can work either way.

Following is a high level overview of our deployment.

In the preceding diagram, please note that the capacity of this deployment is primarily a function of the number of VDI hosts; one could easily add more hosts to grow capacity without upgrading the management infrastructure, but bear in mind that you may need to increase storage for user docs and settings (this analogy holds for traditional desktops with roaming or redirected folders too). That said, another benefit of this architecture is that the design of storage for user docs and settings is decoupled from the VDI design, which makes it especially ideal for pooled virtual desktops.

Read the complete blog post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2013/05/22/2000-seat-vdi-deployment-benchmark.aspx

Windows Server 2012 RemoteApp and Desktop Connections: Default Connections and File Type Associations

A new blog post by Travis Howe, a developer on the Remote Desktop Virtualization team on default connections and file type associations in Remote Desktop Services on Windows Server 2012.

A summary:

“…Default connections

When we added the RemoteApp and Desktop Connections feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, many administrators wanted to be able to push connections to their users by using Group Policy. To help enable this, we supported a “silent install” API that allowed a user to be signed up for a connection without any prompts. Administrators had to push something like this script on Script Center to their users by using Group Policy.

In Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, we improved this scenario. We have added a new Group Policy container under “Remote Desktop Services” called “RemoteApp and Desktop Connections,” and within that container have defined a new policy setting called “Specify default connection URL.” Enabling this policy setting causes users to be subscribed to RemoteApp and Desktop Connection at the specified URL. RemoteApp and Desktop Connections that have been installed by using this policy setting have a special name: default connections…”

“…File type associations support: what does it mean?

So what do I mean when I say that default connections are able to install file type associations? When an administrator is publishing RemoteApp programs, they can also choose to publish file types that should be associated with that program. Then, when the RemoteApp program is installed as part of a default connection, we associate the RemoteApp program with those file types on the client machine.

The next time the user tries to open a file of that type, the standard Windows 8 file type association behavior will be used to determine which of the registered programs should be used to open the file. Often, the user will be given a choice. For example, if Microsoft Paint has been published as a RemoteApp program with the .bmp file type association, the user is presented with the following options…”

For the complete blog post and source:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2013/05/21/windows-server-2012-remoteapp-and-desktop-connections-default-connections-and-file-type-associations.aspx

New Article: Disaster recovery options for the RD Connection Broker 2012 (HA)

My new article “Disaster recovery options for the RD Connection Broker 2012 (HA)” is now published on VirtualizationAdmin.com

“…Since the role of the RD Connection Broker is so important, a big improvement has been made in the ability to create an active-active highly available (HA) solution. However, since all RD Connection Brokers in a HA solution use the same central SQL Server database, this database (and the instance it’s running on) suddenly become your Single Point of Failure. To overcome this, it’s important to also take a close look at options to setup a High Available SQL Server environment for your RD Connection Brokers. Besides that, regular backups of your RD Connection Broker database are obviously also strongly advised and will save you a lot of trouble in case of a serious SQL Server outage.

In case you do have to recover from a loss of the RD Connection Broker Database, there are several ways to perform this recovery based on what exactly got lost. In this article we will discuss several recovery scenarios.…”

Source: http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/vdi-articles/microsoft-hyper-v/disaster-recovery-options-rd-connection-broker-2012-ha.html

KB: Authenticated users are removed from the Remote Desktop Users group after you set the drain mode on a Windows Server 2008 R2-based RDS server (2834976)

A new KB was just released (2834976 ) for Windows Server 2008 R2 running RD Session Host. Where putting the server in Drain Mode causes the removal of the authenticated users group in the Remote Desktop Users group are removed.

“…Consider the following scenario:

• You have the Remote Desktop Services (RDS) role installed on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2.
• You set the user logon mode to drain mode on the computer. For example, you run the following command on the computer:

  chglogon /drain

  In this scenario, the authenticated users in the Remote Desktop Users group are removed…”

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2834976/

KB: RDS client cannot connect to RD Session Host server after the server IP address is changed (2844958)

A new KB article (KB2844958) was released last week regarding changing IP addresses of RD Session Host servers part of a Windows Server 2012 deployment. Apparently the SessionDirectoryRedirectionIP registry entry stores the IP address of an RD Session Host server that was assigned when the RDS deployment was created. Although the IP address of the RD Session Host server is changed, the IP address in the RD Connection Broker setting is not updated. Therefore, RDS clients cannot connect to the session collection.

“…Considering the following scenario:

• You set up a standard deployment of Remote Desktop Services (RDS) in Windows Server 2012. The deployment contains Remote Desktop (RD) Session Host servers, an RD Connection Broker server, and an RD Web Access server.
• You create a session collection that can be accessed by RDS clients through the RD Web Access website.
• The IP addresses of all RD Session Host servers in the session collection are changed.

In this scenario, the RDS clients cannot connect to the session collection, and you receive the following error message during the connection:

Your credentials did not work...”

“…Warning Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall the operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that these problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk.
To resolve this problem, delete the SessionDirectoryRedirectionIP registry entry of the following registry subkey from each RD Session Host server in the session collection:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\ClusterSettings…”

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2844958/en-us?sd=rss&spid=16526

Release of LoginVSI 4

 

LoginVSI version 4 will be officially released soon!. Through the LoginVSI VIP program the new release was already send to me last week. I upgraded my lab running version 3.7 to 4 and I must say the installation went very smooth.

The management console has been completely restyled and looks very “modern UI”

You now have the ability to create several phases per test.

During the test the management console shows an overview of the running test.

And also new is a Session Monitor containing information on the session currently running.

If error occur during the test the management console immediately informs you about this with a link to a log file that contains a detailed description.

The Analyser now shows more details about the test which improves the readability.

Besides these changes, the test image footprint of Login VSI has been reduced, a new benchmarking mode enforces strict testing standards and the workloads have been improved to better reflect real world user behavior

The new version obviously requires some more testing to do more a detailed review, but so far the changes in version 4 are impressive!

Watch http://www.loginvsi.com/ for the official launch !