RDS Advice

[IAMCloud_Curt]

Afternoon all, just want to clear a few things up.

 

Currently planning my RDS project and looking to roll out in the near future. I basically want staff able to access RDWeb and use basic application such as Office and SIMS and the internet.

 

A consultant we use said to me we would need physical servers for this to work, but I thought that's nonsense, anyhow.. I've done abit of research myself and asked a few people are they have Virtual RDS Servers, and said they never have any problems as long as the farm spreads the load balance and both virtual rds servers share the workload.

 

We've got 5 HOSTS in our current setup, 4 of the hosts are Dell PowerEdge R630

 

CPU: Intel® Xeon® E5-2603 v3 1.6GHz,15M Cache,6.40GT/s QPI,No Turbo,No HT,6C/6T (85W)

RAM Installed: 64GB on each host.

 

Was just wondering if our hosts could handle me installing and configuring RDS, definitely got the spec to run 2 virtual RDS servers?

 

Thanks in advance if anyone could advise.

[localzuk]

How many people are going to be connecting at once? We run 3 RDS servers (soon to be 4+), and we give each one 16GB RAM. Each of these can handle about 20-30 people happily.

 

One of the key things is the disk IO. What storage are you going to be putting these on? I have ours installed on RAID5 SSDs. On standard disks, you'll see a slower performance overall.

 

Also, remember that you'll also need a session broker, an RDWeb/gateway, and a licensing server. I have these on separate VMs, each using 1GB of RAM (though the RDWeb/Gateway goes up to 2 or so GB sometimes).

[IT_KING]

What solution are you thinking of for RDP

[kmount]

As localzuk said it's all down to what you're doing with them.

 

As someone who does this kind of stuff for a living similar to your consultant it may be them erring on the side of caution if your hosts are already busy doing other things it takes away potential resources from your new RDS environment.

 

I'd be a little wary of your clock speed only being 1.6GHz it's rather low - won't stop you doing it but is something to keep tabs on if your users are likely to be hitting the clock hard. (not so likely as you said Office, Internet usage on the most part)

 

Typically we find when you hit sort of 200/250 concurrent connections it starts to make sense to consider a small number of physical servers vs a truck load of virtual ones to get the same kind of density. We support both kinds though; it's alright until you end up managing a large number of 2/4vCPU RDS hosts when you could run a small number of higher user density physical core ones instead. (yes, the user impact of a host failure is larger but the management time is lower and you're always at least n+1 right? and if you virtualise more than 1 client server on the same hypervisor host as others the argument is similar anyway)

 

Devil in the detail though, how many concurrent users are you expecting and if you're expecting youtube/etc using RemoteFX I think you may start to hurt that low clock speed (web browsers and multimedia content hurt) - make sure you protect your other infrastructure running on there from the RDS servers too!

 

As localzuk said, you may want to consider separate VMs for the management environment - if it's only small numbers you may be able to write the redundancy risk off as a noted issue otherwise you need a pair of gateways, connection brokers, sql servers (with witness) and licensing services. For most small environments though you can get away with 1 of each (and no SQL) and in really small ones some people will co-exist some of the roles together. Having it virtual helps you not necessarily need to do that though.

[IAMCloud_Curt]

Well we currently have approx 120 staff, but not all will use this. I'd probably say 40-50 at a PUSH will use this feature.

 

Currently our host use SAS Port RAID Mode and it links with our SAN on the network, I think the drives will be able to cope personally. So you reckon have separate VM's for the Session Broker, Gateway and Licensing Server?

[localzuk]

Personally, I advise separating out roles, yeah. It means you could also duplicate those roles too, so you have redundancy for each - then you can take any of them down for maintenance without taking things down overall.

 

Separating out roles is one of the main advantages of virtualising anyway.

[IAMCloud_Curt]

What solution are you thinking of for RDP

Microsoft

[kmount]

For 40-50 you should be fine virtualising the whole lot, just watch the clock speeds don't devalue your solution.

 

Not a lot of point buying tin for that small a number, just works out expensive.

 

Go with localzuk's model, it makes sense and similar size environment.

[IAMCloud_Curt]

@kmount @localzuk - Just actually logged onto OpenManage - Dell website is lying haha

 

[localzuk]

Those CPUs will be much more capable!

[IAMCloud_Curt]

Those CPUs will be much more capable!

I knew I had pretty beast spec, that why I thought when you said about my clock speed I began to get worried

[cpjitservices]

Our RDS Servers are virtual... Brilliant way to do it... you can add as many or as little resources as you like depending on usage.

[kmount]

Much better CPUs!!

[IAMCloud_Curt]

Has anyone used any guides to set up RDS before? If so could you link me to them so I can take a look the weekend. Got some YouTube content already prepared to watch.

[sted]

Has anyone used any guides to set up RDS before? If so could you link me to them so I can take a look the weekend. Got some YouTube content already prepared to watch.

 

basically do what the wizzard says will get it working internally externally depends if your domain names match

[bwestlake]

Doesn't really need a guide very simple to setup..

 

Just setup the gateway on one server and session hosts on the other, we have 4 servers 6gb ram each.. they do our thin pcs too..

 

IT: How to Set Up Your Own Terminal Server Using Remote Desktop Services On Server 2008 R2 - should help you for 2008 r2, and then basically for 2012r2 its virtually the same but easier! Good Luck

[IT_KING]

Installing and Configuring Remote Desktop Services (RDS) on Windows Server 2012 | WackyTechTips

 

but for a reference guide use https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc753962.aspx

[rama1712]

localzuk

 

What spec did you do the build vm's, How Much HD space, Ram nics etc

 

Would like to keep VM's to small as possiable

All this based on w2012r2

 

Thanks

[bwestlake]

I gave ours 2cores, 8gb ram, 80gb HDD but have increased HDD size to 120gb

[rama1712]

bwestlake

Do you have any notes what you did

 

I have done rds on 1 server before 2008r2 but I have a nice newish host that we want to move it all to

[bwestlake]

I followed this guide but then made adaptions on the way

 

IT: How to Set Up Your Own Terminal Server Using Remote Desktop Services On Server 2008 R2

 

basically the same on 2012 r2 / 2016 but you just do it on your gateway server

[gshaw]

The R610 I just did our setup on gives 4GB RAM for the Gateway / Web Access, 4GB RAM for the broker and 48GB for the Session Host [emoji14]

 

Trying to keep the cost down by using Windows Server Standard licensing rather than Datacenter so 3 VMs to a host seems to be the sweet spot due to the way the new core licensing works (or so it seems)