Windows 2012 now provides several flavors of VDI, depending on your needs.
- Traditional VDI with a minimum single server footprint supporting multiple sessions for smaller or less resource intensive environments.
- Small physical foot print - with Windows 2008, we employed this for a client as a single virtual machine for 40 users.
- Advanced VDI employing multiple servers. Best for very large scale. highly available or resource intensive environments. Servers:
- Required
- Connection broker (Physical or virtual)
- Web Access (Physical or virtual)
- Hyper-V Host (Physical - either Hyper-V 2012 (free) or Windows 2012 Server with the Hyper-V option installed).
- Optional
- Gateway (Physical or virtual)
- Licensing Server (Physical or virtual)
- RemoteFx
- improved device transparency (USB).
- improved 3-D graphics processing.
- Multitouch support
- Better performance over a wide range of network connections for the entire user experience, including video.
- Single sign-on
I started experimenting with Windows 2012/8 VDI just over a week ago. The first step was to define the server set to be employed,. Currently there are two options, an all-in-one single server option and a three server option. I decided to start with the 3 server option as this appeared to be the most scalable choice. The servers required were:
- Eval-CB - Connection Broker (Virtual)
- Eval-WA - Web Access (Virtual)
- Eval2012-HV - A Hyper-V 2012 server (this is the free version of Microsoft's 2012 Virtualizaton Host server)
The security environment was my 2008R2 development domain. This caused some problems when I decided to apply roaming profiles later in the process, but I eventually found a solution to this.
A summary of the process:
- Created the 3 servers.
- Assigned static IPs, and implemented manual DNS settings.
- Set the Time Zones (all)
- Joined the servers to the domain (all).
- Added the personalization feature (CB, WA).
- Configured the desktops (CB, WA)
- Started the Server Management process
- Collected these servers in the All server management view
- Selected the create a RDS option.
- Followed the wizard selecting the three server solution.
- Verified all the options and let it run.
- After reboots, ran the server manager again to set up the collection.
- I had previously set up a windows 8 template so I chose this option. There is a wizard option to create a template employing an iso of the windows 8 media disk. The template must be sysprepped before use by the collection builder process.
- Set up each desktop to start with 512M of memory in dynamic mode with a max of 1024M.
- Experimented with the user profile options (setting up the user profiles here as opposed to in Active Directory).
Issues
- Access website Certificate errors - expected and not a problem.
- Profiles weren't functioning (I had to set up the profiles directories in the collection setup, the 2008 AD options didn't work.). Also unchecked the reset on exit box in collection setup. Make sure that the shared datastore directory where you store the profiles has the appropriate privileges (shared as full access for all (domain) users).
- Connection to the RDS website was spotty. Had to go into the Virtualized servers and set their power settings to High performance.
- Also make sure that the Link Layer Topology Discovery service is started.
- Had to reboot all the servers after creating the OU for the RDS user pool. I got tired of waiting for the refresh to reach the servers and didn't feel like chancing a powershell typo at 3AM.
- Connections were a bit slow as each session had to be integrated with its profile., but not terribly.
- Once up, speed was quite good. Almost as fast as working on a live machine.
- More complicated setup than before, but everything needed is really covered by the wizard accept for establishing connections between users and specific RDS sessions.
- Resource balancing is quite good.
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