Microsoft RemoteFX: Delivering a Rich, Connected User Experience to the Virtual Desktop

Many businesses have, in the past, waited until the first service pack is released before implementing a new client or server operating system. Microsoft’s latest operating systems: Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 have a new service pack that is scheduled to be released shortly.  As a Microsoft Gold Partner New Signature  receives early access to these betas and we enthusiastically take advantage to experiment, learn and gain real world expertise with the improved products.

We have been extremely excited to be using two of the newest features that SP1 enables: dynamic memory and RemoteFX. Both are game-changing software technologies that expand the functionality of Windows Server 2008 R2 in major ways. Both are meaty topics, so today we are going to tackle RemoteFX.

RemoteFX is the Microsoft terminology for a series of technologies they purchased two years ago and have been refining since. To get a feel for what RemoteFX enables, it’s helpful to examine the history of virtualization and how companies are looking to maximize their investment.

Over the past five years, many organizations have increasingly turned to server virtualization to lower costs, improve reliability, reduce maintenance and increase utilization of existing hardware. For some time the concept of desktop virtualization has also been emerging as an opportunity to dramatically improve network manageability and provide more robust technology services to end-users.

Traditionally, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has had a number of challenges including management, performance and price. Without proper management solutions in place, having custom applications specific to individual staff members becomes a nightmare. With workstations routinely hitting their performance limits for certain users, keeping performance problems from spreading across virtual boundaries to other workstations becomes another issue. And finally, from a price perspective, moving 50 workstations onto one single server has to be less expensive than simply running the workstations normally, which is a lofty goal to hit.

Microsoft now has a full suite of solutions to address many of the challenges listed above, from dynamic desktop allocation (System Center Configuration Manager) to application virtualization (App-V) to management of virtual workstations themselves (System Center Virtual Machine Manager). Where do RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory fit into the picture? The latter primarily addresses performance issues and ensuring that virtual workstations don’t adversely impact each other. We’ll discuss more in a follow-up post.

RemoteFX, by contrast, is all about end-user performance. In the past, when workers have utilized Remote Desktop Services in the traditional model, they’ve been limited to simple office tasks. Anything requiring higher quality graphics has been strictly out of bounds. This has resulted in VDI being deployed to certain employees, but few “high-end” ones due to the the lack of features. With RemoteFX, servers can add in custom hardware to enable full graphical rendering and displaying, allowing those users with higher-end hardware to have those devices fully virtualized. This has three benefits: first, workers with expensive workstations can begin using cheaper hardware for their desktops, providing cost savings; second, in the past, if an expensive workstation failed, the worker in question had to wait until another was purchased, but with the virtual model, a new desktop can be provisioned in minutes; finally, from a end-user perspective, tasks requiring great graphics (charts, visualizations, 3d graphics, full-motion high defintiion video, etc) can finally be performed in the virtual environment without any loss of fidelity.

Thus, RemoteFX neatly provides a similar focus on cost and maintenance for VDI deployments inline with the server virtualization efforts. A final hardware component allowing greater compression of the network traffic (off-loading that traffic from the server’s resources) is due shortly, which should increase the performance gains even more. Here at New Signature we’re excited to finally deploy a virtual desktop solution that does more than simply works. It wows! If you’re ready to move your high-end workstations into the virtual world, now’s the time to move forward and see some immediate costs savings.

Next week we’ll go over the performance improvements in Dynamic Memory, and how the virtual desktop experience can be improved for all your workers, not just the high-end and low-end ones.