RDS in 2016

[Tefters]

The master plan is to give VM's to the staff and session based to the students.

 

Our only sticking point is Skype for Business, so we are going to start testing soon with the VDI plugin, but we might find its a no go without Grid cards and servers that can run small countries!

 

Interesting that you want VDI's for staff, I find that majority of staff only use Office, Internet, SIMS and the odd 1 or 2 small application which easily runs in a session host and for consistency I give them a User Profile Disk to save their customization. Don't forget to test the Smartboard passthru if your using them as teacher machines.

Students are pretty much the same other than when it comes to ICT or Graphics where Photoshop or something like that is used.

 

We use S4B here too and although we do have HP and Polycom phones that staff use there are a small handful that use the client for IM and the off BT headset and the audio worked really well with some optimizations.

I can tell you now though that if your planning on doing Video conferencing over either VDI or Session based you will need a GPU otherwise it can be choppy at times.

 

Youtube playback is pretty good through session based however can get a bit rocky at times and therefore I would highly recommend a GPU which would make it smooth as a babies bum but if its like this on Session based it would be the same on VDI.

 

I have the following rules i follow here:-

 

- Teacher PC's are always proper PC's (minimum i3, 4gb ram, 120gb SSD)

- Suites for ICT and Graphic Suites follow the same rule as teachers

- Staff offices, staffroom, PC's in classrooms for general use, suites for subjects like business, geography, languages etc... are all Thin Client

Edited October 17, 2016 by Tefters

[CAWJames]

Yes the majority of ours are the office worker type, but we then add in the SfB with video, plus we have an Planet eStream setup, and not to mention youtube, we decided to look at individual VM's with GRID cards, we have a healthy budget, but with this kind of thing, budgets are blown easily!

 

I am hopefully trying to acquire a PoC server with more RAM, cores and IOPS(SSD based RAID10) than I can shake a stick at to do some testing.

 

UX is key, and if I can't provide that, the budget goes on new client side hardware.

[Tefters]

I run Raid 10 SSD in my DL380's Gen 7 hyper-v hosts running the session host VM's with about 128GB ram at the moment and it runs fantastic other than the slight chop on video for which the only solution is a GRID card.

 

I would seriously look at setting up a session host setup first on your PoC before going full VDI. VDI was only ever good if you really needed to give the full PC access, session based has come a long way now and the differences are really minimal.

[CAWJames]

Thanks I will test both sides of the coin after hearing that. How many sessions can you run on a physical host? or how many per session host and how many session hosts per physical before you see performance problems?

[Tefters]

Host:-

120gb RAM

240gb SSD

 

I allocate 16.3GB ram per VM (session host) and 8GB to the host

I can only host 4 VM's max per host due to disk space in my case, ram and cpu have never been issue, i can obviously assign more ram if needed or even set the VM's to dynamic!

I run deduplicated on the hosts too as they are only holding VHD files and that compresses really well.

 

I set a limit of 25 users to a session host VM and don't have any issues other then sometimes CPU if someone goes crazy with chrome.

 

Due to having a dual hex core server I assign 3 CPU's per VM (3x4=12, 2x6 core cpu's = 12).

Looking at the DL380 Gen 9 now you can go as far as 22 core Xeon's so 2 of those puppies your talking 44 cores in 1 server! Chuck in a nice 256gb or even 512gb ram and SSD and for resilience go 2 of those on a Storage Spaces Direct setup and O M G is all i can say!

Edited October 17, 2016 by Tefters

[Homer]

Question - moving my 2012 RDS up to 2016 (virtualised desktops, not session host) and I have an odd issue where my Windows 10 box can't manage the farm when the new Server 2016 CB is active? Make the old 2012 CB active and it is OK. Windows 8/2012 can manage it fine!

 

Just says: A Remote Desktop Services deployment does not exit in the server pool.

 

When... well, it does. And all of the servers with any applicable roles are added to server manager!

 

Other than the management side, it all works as it should. Moved one of the hosts up to 2016 in anticipation of getting some Gen2 vm's produced which should massively improve things.

[CAWJames]

You still can't have Gen2 VM's I tried that when I got 2016 installed, the template can still only be a Gen1. I built a Win10 VM up in Gen2, tried to import it into a collection, and still same Gen1 only error

[CAWJames]

Ah, I got that error, but my host server is still 2012R2, so that may be why I can't have Gen2, as they say it is a feature in 2016. Might just be me with 2016 everything apart from my host being 2012R2

[Homer]

Get that bad boy onto 2016 mate hehe

 

Will be doing the vm tomorrow with some luck. This server manager thing is bugging me though

[Tefters]

What issues are you having with Gen2 ? My Hosts for session based are still 2012 R2 running Gen2 VM's that are Server 2016. The CB and WEB are still 2012 R2 too, only the licensing server is 2016 at the moment.

[Homer]

Might want to watch that mate the MSFT docs show the CB should be upgraded to 2016 first followed by the virtualisation/session hosts and then the rest as/when

[CAWJames]

I am on 2016 CB, Web access and GW, but host is 2012R2, when I create a collection and am asked for a template I select my new Gen2 W10 template and it complains that only Gen1 are accepted as templates, so I assume the whole lot need to be 2016 for Gen2 to be available. My host runs all our servers as well, so while it will be updated, it won't be for the time being, as our RDS is testing, while our servers are production, and I am not ready to bring 2016 into production quite yet.

 

Thanks

 

James

[Tefters]

Hmmmm... I got 2012R2 hosts along with 2012R2 GW, Web and CB with Gen2 2016 VM's as the session hosts without issues.

 

All running Live today for the first time.

 

Couple of thing to note initially:-

 

- The start menu search seems to only work for a few people, EG. Typing Word only brings up Wordpad in the results instead of MS Word as well. Need to investigate this more but happens to some users not all, possibly a specific session host?

- The initial logon time on Server 2016 is A LOT more intensive on the CPU/Mem/Disk and therefore takes longer, these session hosts are on running on a host with an SSD so the IOPS are not too bad but definitely seeing a high performance hit on the CPU compared to 2012R2

- Having added Windows Photo Viewer back in via reg hacks images open fine in it but thumbnails of pictures do not appear in the windows explorer so now you just get icons labeled BMP for example - Again need to investigate when I get a moment

[Tefters]

OK so 1 problem solved from my previous post, the explorer thumbnails not showing in explorer window.

 

Nice and easy fix, simply have whoever your picky user/s are do the following:-

 

1. Click the view tab and then options (folder options) in an explorer window.

2. Click the view tab in the pop-up window.

3. Untick the "Always show icons, never thumbnails" option.

4. Close the folder options pop-up.

5. Have the end user then chose the best icon view, my particular end user found large icons best.

 

Simples!

 

This does take a lot more CPU power when browsing directories full of pictures as I monitored the session host CPU while the end user browsed 1 or 2 folders with 150 pictures in each and it took a good minute to a minute and a half to populate all the thumbnail pictures and the CPU spiked. Due to this my suggestion is to not do this in the default profile for all users to eventually have and just advice the odd user that really wants it or even better set it for them so they don't know and can't advice others, every % of processor is crucial in a smooth RDS Setup

[DrCheese]

This would have been a key selling point. Common MS!

We use this for remoteaccess now

HTML5 RDP Client - Web Based Remote Desktop | Ericom

 

We've had zero complants using it & our remoteaccess is heavily used now

[Homer]

Just an FYI - can't run RDS on Core installations. Has to be full fat Windows Server. Wasted a whole afternoon finding this out...

[Homer]

We use this for remoteaccess now

HTML5 RDP Client - Web Based Remote Desktop | Ericom

 

We've had zero complants using it & our remoteaccess is heavily used now

 

Could you PM me how much you're paying for this? looks very interesting

[FN-GM]

Just an FYI - can't run RDS on Core installations. Has to be full fat Windows Server. Wasted a whole afternoon finding this out...

 

Why would you want to run RDS on server core? Surely you would use RDS to deliver apps to your end users and these have a GUI.

[Tefters]

I can only hope he's talking about sub roles such as RDCB etc...

 

I've looked down the server core list on technet and other than some very basic AD roles I cannot see any other advantages in roles. I was hoping to core install a DC hosting Certificate Management but bailed out and used core due to lack of scripts available by MS to set it up.

 

While core looks great on paper, other than very basic AD, DNS, DHCP and IIS roles everything else is a bit of a cluster duck.

Edited October 27, 2016 by Tefters

[silvestre]

We use this for remoteaccess now

HTML5 RDP Client - Web Based Remote Desktop | Ericom

 

We've had zero complants using it & our remoteaccess is heavily used now

 

please can you pm me how much you pay as well.

[Homer]

For the supporting roles such as CB, Web Access, Licensing etc... why on earth would I publish a server core collection to my users

[Tefters]

I knew this, not sure why anybody would think different lol

[FN-GM]

For the supporting roles such as CB, Web Access, Licensing etc... why on earth would I publish a server core collection to my users

 

Sorry! ha ha. I had tunnel vision thinking about session host!

[FN-GM]

Bit disappointed there still isn't any integration with ADFS

[DrCheese]

? I thought RDS web gateway used AD auth anyway?