Microsoft releases Windows Server
2016 in last year with many new exciting features. Improved Remote Desktop Services
is one of their major selling points. So what’s comes with Remote Desktop 2016,
what can we gain from upgrading, from this post lets discuss the major improvements
and design changes of Remote Desktop Services 2016.
Design Changes
Remote Desktop Services in Azure
You can deploy Remote desktop
services in Azure IAAS services. This is fully supported and there are some
good advantages while doing so. Also Microsoft promote to host your RDS in
azure after demoting Remote App Azure service. Following advantages can be
archived hosting RDS in Azure.
Connection Broker High Availability changes
Two or more connection broker servers are required to address the high availability of a RDS solution. Also it require a dedicated SQL database, and to make it high available, we should create a SQL mirror or SQL availability groups. But with RDS 2016 we don’t need a dedicated SQL database. You can use an existing SQL cluster to host the connection broker database. Also as mentioned previously you can use the Azure SQL DB.
User Profile Disk
User profile disk came up with
Remote desktop services 2012, it store user and application data on a single
virtual disk that is dedicated to one user’s profile, completely transparent to
the user, users can save documents to their Documents folder (on what appears
to be a local drive) and change their background wallpaper and app settings
while, at the same time, all personal settings persist when connecting to
different computers in a virtual desktop collection or session collections.
With RDS 2016 in azure you can use Storage Space Direct for the file server of UPD. You don’t need shared storage cluster which is still not possible in Azure. Storage space Direct enable scale out file server (SOFS) using Azure VM’s. You can use two small VM’s with Storage Space Direct and enable high availability to your User Profile Disks.
New and Improved Features of RDS 2016
Personal Session Desktops
This is a new feature in RDS 2016
which you can assign specific users to a specific RDSH server, so when user
login using Remote desktop session they will log only to that defined Session
host server. You can use the same RDS collection to do this. And it will allow
users to have additional access rights to the session host servers. Which they
can install their own apps, restart session host server etc.
Improved connection handling performance
Connection broker improved with
2016 and now it can handle over 10,000 concurrent logon requests. When large number
of users trying to log-on or log-off, which also called as “Login Storm”,
improved connection broker can handle the load without giving delays to users. This
open the doors to service providers to provide RDS as a Desktop as a Service to
their customers.
Graphics enhancements
RemoteFX vGPU
RemoteFX vGPU provides a rich
desktop remoting experiencing with Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V and Remote
Desktop Services enabling multiple VM’s to share the same physical GPU for
graphics acceleration. Windows Server 2016 Remote Desktop Services includes the
following improvements to RemoteFX vGPU
Discrete Device Assignment
Discrete Device Assignment (DDA)
is a Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V feature that allows some PCI Express devices
to be passed through directly to a guest VM (to be controlled by the guest VM).
Devices used in this way cannot be used by the host or other VMs.
Windows Server 2016 Remote
Desktop Session Hosts can now take advantage of DDA, enabling enhanced graphics
performance.
Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)
Graphics Compression
Windows Server 2016 (and Windows
10) RDP graphics compression (codec) now implements full-screen AVC 444 mode.
This enhancement provides:
Support for Gen 2 VMs
With Hyper-V improvements of
Server 2016, now we can take advantage of some of security features of Gen 2
VMs as template images for personal or pooled VM collections and personal
session desktop collections.
End user experience changes
Windows Multipoint Services
MultiPoint Services is a new
server role in Windows Server 2016. It is a server solution that is easy to
deploy and easy to manage. It enables low-cost per seat desktop computing.
MultiPoint allows multiple users, each with their own independent Windows
experience, to simultaneously share one computer. The unique tool-set of this
role allows monitoring of all user sessions on the MultiPoint server.
MultiPoint does not use or
require the Remote Desktop (RD) Connection Broker and RD Gateway roles.
Enabling the Multipoint Services role, also installs Remote Desktop Session
Host role which allows users to connect remotely with devices of their choice
by using Remote Desktop applications available on Windows, Windows phone,
Android, iOS and Mac OS.
Cheers
References
Microsoft Ignite Conference 2016
TechNet blogs, and TechNet