Published: September 10th, 2012

Windows Server 2012: Identity and Access

Module 2: RDS Features and Components.

Module Manual Author: Andrew J Warren, Content Master

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Contents

CONTENTS .................................................................................................................................................................................................................. III

RDS Components ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 4

Personal vs. Pooled VMs ................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Personal VM Collections .......................................................................................................................................................... 6 Pooled VM Collections ............................................................................................................................................................. 6

Session Virtualization Deployments ............................................................................................................................................................. 8

Session Virtualization Deployments ......................................................................................................................................... 8 Personalization with User Profile Disk ......................................................................................................................................................... 9

Storage Options ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 10

High Availability ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 11

GPU Choices ........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 12

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RDS Components

The following components exist within the RDS architecture:

RD Virtualization Host. This integrates with Hyper-V to provide VMs that can be used as

personal virtual desktops or virtual desktop pools. User accounts can be assigned a unique

personal virtual desktop or be redirected to a virtual desktop pool that provides VM-based,

centralized desktops based on a pool of VMs that multiple users share.

RD Session Host. This hosts Windows-based applications or Windows desktops for RDS

clients. An RD Session Host server can host Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V)

applications and session-based desktops. Users can connect to an RD Session Host server (via

RD Connection Broker, RD Web Access or Remote App, and Desktop Connection) to run

programs to save files and to use network resources on that server. Administrators can use a

load-balanced RD Session Host server farm to scale the performance by distributing RDS

sessions across multiple servers.

RD Connection Broker. This provides a single, aggregated view of RemoteApp applications,

session-based desktops, and virtual desktops to users. It connects or reconnects a client

computer to either a session-based desktop, a virtual desktop, or a RemoteApp program. It

also stores session state information (session IDs, user names, RD Session Host server name).

RD Web Access. This provides a customizable web portal for accessing session-based

desktops, virtual desktops, and RemoteApp programs. The client queries an RD Web Access

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server over HTTPS. Resources are displayed from more than one farm, or from a combination

of farm and individual servers. You can filter the view on a per-user basis so that each user

sees only the authorized programs.

RD Licensing. Each user or device that connects to the RD Session Host server must have a

license, and Active Directory® Domain Services (AD DS) must be installed as a prerequisite

for per-user licensing. The RD Session Host server queries AD DS for the licenses. When a

client connects to an RD Session Host server, it determines the license and requests an RDS

Client Access License (CAL) or VDI Suite license from a Remote Desktop License Server on

behalf of the client. If an appropriate license is available, the RDS CAL or VDI Suite license is issued to the client—the client will be able to connect.

RD Gateway. The RD Gateway role service in Windows Server 2012 enables devices to

securely connect over the Internet to RD Session Host servers or RD Virtualization Host

servers behind the corporate firewall. RD Gateway uses the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)

over HTTPS to establish a secure, encrypted connection. On the RD Gateway, an appropriate

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate has to be applied. This can be configured directly on

the RD Gateway and the certificate mapping can easily be changed for that.

Storage. Another improvement concerns storage options. RDS inherits the storage options of

Windows Server 2012, so users have the option of running VDI with server message block

(SMB), storage area networks (SANs), or local direct attached storage (DAS).

RDS supports remoting from both sessions on an RD Session Host server and VMs on an RD

Virtualization Host server. Connections to the RemoteApp and VMs hosted on these servers may be

stored in an RDP file or displayed using the publishing features of RD Web Access. In the figure, the

RD Connection Broker routes incoming connections to the appropriate session or VM depending on

the contents of the RDP file and its load balancing. The RD Gateway provides secure wide area

network (WAN) access directly or through RD Web Access, and the RD Licensing server handles

licensing for RDS.

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Personal vs. Pooled VMs

Personal VM Collections The personal virtual desktop uses a dedicated VM that is assigned to a particular user. All user data

(such as My Documents) and profile information (personalization) is retained on an image that is

specific to the VM, so the experience is similar to a physical desktop client. This deployment is

suitable for knowledge workers (for example, software developers or testers) who require

administrator rights to have full control over their virtual desktop to deploy their own applications

and to customize and personalize the virtual desktop environment.

Pooled VM Collections Another way of deploying VM-based desktops is through pooled VMs that are identically configured

and hosted on one or more Hyper-V servers. Pooled virtual desktops are best suited for office or task

workers who need to work on some standard applications and do not require personalized desktop

configuration or customization. In this configuration, when a user’s session ends, the user’s data is

not stored on the VM. A typical configuration uses folder redirection to save the data to another

server so it is available when the user next logs on, but no configuration data is saved between

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sessions. The pooled virtual desktop is a more efficient use of VM resources—a set of VMs can

support a larger number of users than the personal virtual desktop.

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Session Virtualization Deployments

Session Virtualization Deployments RDS session virtualization, formerly known as Terminal Services, is a proven and mature centralized

desktop infrastructure that many organizations deploy instead of VDI to increase user density on the

host and therefore reduce costs. Windows Server 2012 makes it easier to deploy this architecture by

offering a session virtualization deployment scenario.

A session virtualization deployment consists of RD Session Host servers and infrastructure servers,

such as RD Licensing, RD Connection Broker, RD Gateway, and RD Web Access, which, as already

mentioned, are consistent across both VM and session deployments.

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Personalization with User Profile Disk

A major blocker for the “pooled virtual desktop collection” model has been lack of personalization;

the pooled virtual desktop collection is based on a common virtual desktop template, so the user’s

personal documents, settings, and configurations would normally not be present. User Profile Disk

was added to solve this problem for either VM-based or session-based desktop deployments. As the

user logs on to different VMs within the pool or different RD Session Hosts within the session

collection, his or her User Profile Disk is mounted, providing access to the user’s complete profile.

User Profile Disk operates at a lower layer, so it works seamlessly with existing user state

technologies such as Roaming User profiles and Folder Redirection.

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Storage Options

RDS is built on top of Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 storage, so the enhancements made

throughout the hypervisor and storage stack in Windows Server 2012 benefit all RDS deployments.

To name a few, Microsoft supports:

VDI over SMB, SANs, or local DAS.

Pooled virtual desktop collections, which can be configured with storage tiers to optimize IOPS.

Highly scalable and resilient configurations with clustering and with Storage Spaces.

All these improvements provide a dramatic reduction in costs while maintaining performance and

management benefits of central storage.

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High Availability

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. In this release, we have eliminated the need for clustering and

switched to an active/active model. With this model, two or more RD Connection Brokers can be

combined as a farm to provide both fault tolerance and load balancing. This prevents the broker from

being a single point of failure and also allows ‘scale out’ as load demands.

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GPU Choices

In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Microsoft first introduced the RemoteFX virtual GPU (vGPU), which

provided DirectX® 9 application support and Aero® theming for VMs running on Hyper-V servers

with physical GPUs.

In Windows Server 2012, the vGPU feature is expanded and all Windows 8 VMs can take advantage

of a DirectX 11–capable GPU, either emulated in software (softGPU) when no GPU is present in the

host or para-virtualized and hardware-accelerated (vGPU) when a DirectX11–compatible video card is

present in the host.

RemoteFX Adaptive Graphics provides graphics processing that enables higher fidelity delivery of

virtual desktop and RemoteApp programs, including video, text, Aero Glass, and 3-D experience

across various networks, including those where bandwidth is limited and latency is high.

The following are some of the key components that enable RemoteFX Adaptive Graphics:

RemoteFX graphics processing pipeline and codecs

RemoteFX progressive rendering

Aero and three-dimensional (3-D) experience that uses the Microsoft basic display adapter

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By default, the RemoteFX graphics processing pipeline adaptively determines the optimal RDP

experience level based on available bandwidth and server resource availability.

You do not require a GPU in the server to deliver a basic Aero experience. If there is not a GPU

present, we emulate it on the CPU. In this way, we can deliver an Aero desktop to users with basic

3-D capabilities that make Microsoft Office and browsing, for example, look great, and we will do that

out of the box and we will deliver the Aero experience. If you do have applications that require 3-D

acceleration, because they are 3-D and they are video-intensive, we do support GPU used in the

server; there is sublist of DirectX accelerating GPUs that we recommend to use. If you have those in

your server, you can turn on the RemoteFX for GPU, assign that GPU to the VMs, and then take

advantage of GPU in the server. So you get the best experience for 3-D, full animations, and

transitions and also the best application compatibility.

Next step watch the Feature Drilldown demo video.