TechEd Europe 2012

One more day before TechEd Europe 2012 is over. It went by in a flash!

 

I was attending the 2012 edition of TechEd Europe as one of the Technical Learning Center Product Experts for VDI / RDS. I spend quite some time in the VDI Booth in the Expo hall giving demo’s and answering questions to attendees on what's new on the management of RDS. A lot of positive reactions on all that’s new for VDI / RDS in Windows Server 2012. Thanks everyone for dropping by!

 

 

In between duties in the booth I was able to attend many really interesting sessions on RDS, VDI, App-V 5.0, UE-V and much more, and visit some of the other booths and vendors in de Expo Hall.

One more day to go, but all in all a great event! Compliments to Microsoft and the RAI for the organization and hopefully until next year!

RD Connection Broker High Availability in Windows Server 2012 (by RDS team)

I had already written some blog posts on the new Active-Active High Availability (HA) option in the past like RDS in WIN8 Feature highlight no. 1 Better High Availability of the RD Connection Broker and How to configure High Availability for RD Connection Broker on Windows 8 and RD Connection Broker HA – SQL Permissions and most recently RD Connection Broker HA and the RDP properties on the client.

But The Microsoft Remote Desktop Virtualization team released a nice blog post on MSDN on this subject as well. The details are show below.

“…In previous releases, the RD Connection Broker role service has supported an active/passive clustering model. This provided high availability in the case of component failure, but it did not address high scale requirements. The Active/Active Broker feature in Windows Server 2012 eliminates the need for clustering and provides a fully active/active model; with this model, two or more RD Connection Broker servers can be combined under a single DNS entry to provide both fault tolerance and load balancing. This prevents the RD Connection Broker server from being a single point of failure and also allows “scale out” as load demands.

The following diagram shows an Active/Active Broker deployment with one RD Virtualization Host server and one RD Session Host server. The RD Connection Broker servers are using a SQL database for storing data, and RDP clients are connecting to the RD Connection Broker servers using DNS Round Robin.

The end nodes (RD Virtualization Host, RD Session Host, and RD Web Access) are configured with the full list of all the fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) of the RD Connection Broker servers, and they can connect to any of the RD Connection Broker servers in the setup…”

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2012/06/27/rd-connection-broker-high-availability-in-windows-server-2012.aspx

Remote Desktop Web Access single sign-on now easier to enable in Windows Server 2012

The Microsoft RDS team posts a new blog that explain the way to setup Single Sign On (SSO) with Windows Server 2012. The setup has been made a lot easier compared to what you had to configure with Windows Server 2008 R2.

“…Hi, I’m Sergey, one of the developers on the team that produces Remote Desktop Services. In Windows Server 2008 R2, we introduced Web Single Sign-On (web SSO), which reduced the number of times a user was asked for credentials when accessing RemoteApp programs published through Remote Desktop Web Access (RD Web Access). Enabling this was complex and difficult for users. In this post, I'll explain how easy it is to set this up in Windows Server 2012. It basically works "out of the box…”

Source:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2012/06/25/remote-desktop-web-access-single-sign-on-now-easier-to-enable-in-windows-server-2012.aspx

New article: Troubleshooting RDS in Windows Server 2012

My new article titled "Troubleshooting RDS in Windows Server 2012" on virtualizationadmin.com just got published. The article is about ways to gather information to troubleshoot and debug RDS deployments using Windows Server 2012.

 Introduction
In this article we will look at some ways of collecting valuable information for troubleshooting issues in RDS environments when running Windows Server 2012 (up until now Windows Server 8 Beta…”

“…The different roles that are part of the Remote Desktop Services Platform have several log files, trace files and also event logs where information, statuses and errors are stored. This information can be rather useful when troubleshooting an installation or configuration.

The main part of this article will be around a log file that contains information about the installation and configuration process. This log file is called RDMSDeploymentUI.txt. You can find this log file…”

Read the complete article here:
http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/general-virtualization-articles/troubleshooting-rds-windows-server-2012.html

Quest Workspace Desktop Virtualization (formerly vWorkspace) 7.6 is here!

 

Quest released version 7.6 of vWorkspace, what they now call Quest Workspace Desktop Virtualization! Some of the details below.

“…Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 Support (Experimental)
Quest Workspace Desktop Virtualization (formerly vWorkspace) 7.6 introduces support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 (experimental) to allow customers to enjoy the benefits of the next version of Windows today and prepare for a migration to Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 when Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 are officially released later this year. Specifically, we offer customers the ability to start benefiting from some of the great user experience improvements that Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 introduce. Once again, we are the first to market with this kind of support showing our intimate knowlegde of the Microsoft platform due to our great partnership. Please review the System Requirements document to see which configurations are supported.

User Workspace Context
Quest Workspace Desktop Virtualization (formerly vWorkspace) 7.6 introduces a feature called User Workspace Context that provides a wealth of information about the context of the user workspace such as latency and bandwidth, type of Connector used, type of device used, and vWorkspace Connector version so IT admins can gain valuable insights. These insights can be used when creating advanced targets. User Workspace Context is a perfect feature to support BYOD initiatives that are a IT priority for many customers today.

Support for SCVMM 2012 and SQL Server 2012
Quest Workspace Desktop Virtualization (formerly vWorkspace) 7.6 introduces support for the latest release of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, SCVMM 2012 and for the latest release of Microsoft SQL Server, SQL 2012 so they can reap the benefits in a vWorkspace environment…”

Source en read more: http://communities.quest.com/community/vworkspace/blog/2012/06/18/quest-workspace-desktop-virtualization-formerly-vworkspace-76-released

RDS Team: two new blog posts

I have blogged about many new features regarding RDS in Windows Server 8 and later Windows Server 2012 RC. The Microsoft RDS team released two new blog posts yesterday about Whats new in Windows Server 2012 RC and about RemoteFX VGPU. You can find the links below!

Remote Desktop Services “What’s New” in Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate ”…Hi, I’m Ben Meister from the Remote Desktop Virtualization team. We’ve been hard at work after the beta release earlier this year. This post highlights some of the features added and enhancements made in the Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate build. Special thanks to Snesha Foss and Shanmugam Kulandaivel for their major contributions to this post. By now there have been quite a few posts about Windows Server 2012 and the many features that Remote Desktop Services has introduced in this release. If you have not read them all, following are links…”
Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2012/06/13/remote-desktop-services-what-s-new-in-windows-server-2012-release-candidate.aspx

Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too “…When you take Windows 8 Release Preview home and launch it, you’ll see a rich and immersive experience accelerated by a DX11 desktop. Your VDI solution should focus on bringing all of that to you, all while tackling the challenges of distance and connecting from anywhere. You’ll want a touch interface, smooth animations that give a tactile feel, and the richest set of applications and compatibility. You’ll want the ecosystem of software, hardware, and the Windows operating system to bring that together. When RemoteFX v1 released in Windows 7 SP1 early last year, we introduced a set of technologies for a rich PC-like experience for VDI. It was the first place where we introduced and emphasized host-side remoting, a render-capture-encode pipeline, a highly efficient GPU-based encode, throttling based on client activity, ad a DirectX-enabled virtual graphics processing unit (VGPU). All these ideas proliferate more in Windows 8 Release Preview, and the VGPU gets better…”
Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2012/06/13/richvgpu.aspx

Passed the 100.000 page views!

Wow, this blog just passed the 100.000 page views border! I started this blog back in October 2010. Just did a quick check, 145 blog post so far. Thanks to all readers for your interest in the content I write here!

If there’s any RDS / VDI related topic you’d like to see discussed here, or if you’d like to see something be changed or added, please let me know!

Freek Berson
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