Tefters

You know Microsoft, consistency is right up there on their list

Yup same here, we have 2 work rooms for teacher when not in classrooms (3 pc's in each) but are always ram packed so now thanks to RDS 2012 R2 (previously i users Citrix Xenapp at £8k per year on top of RDS cal's) and the way Microsoft evolved the RD Client app across all platforms and RD Gateway the staff bring in their own laptops/mac's/iPad's and use them. I've had to bolster our RDS farm to 2 physical Hyper-V hosts running 6 VM's. Forgot to add that I turn old machines into Thin clients where possible in staff offices etc... where they only use SIMS and Office and have a custom Windows 10 image fully locked down and only loads IE in Kiosk mode directed straight to our RD Gateway Server on an internal DNS zone

Couldn't agree more, it was a HUGE jump in performance, reliability and overall management.

Server 2016 standard under downloads is datacenter. When you click on standard the text reads "Standard/Datacenter and something else ive never heard of..."

Not to mention the USB 3 transfer speeds

Personal advice - Don't use VPN... Its old school, clunky and requires end users to actually have some IT knowledge (and lets all be honest, its teachers we're talking about here!) Stick with 2012 R2 or even better 2016 R2 RDS. As for warranty my servers have been out for 3 years now and I wont be buying any, servers are cheap enough should the worse happen and i cant repair it myself.

Love ESX but wanting to move to Hyper-V now due to their offerings of SSDir, question is can I be ass'd to turf over the whole environment (SAN, Servers and VM's) to Hyper-V... That's a lot of work...

Just stood up 3 2016 RDSH servers on my 2012 R2 RDS farm and all look good. Setup a test group for connection through RDWEB and then it went downhill... Connection error on the Remote Desktop connection part after the RDS logon. Check my DC running RDS Licensing and the service was stopped, started it and tried again, same error, check the RDS licensing service again on DC and it was stopped. Hmmm bug I thought... Started service and looked at the licensing... *drumroll* Its 2012 R2 DC with RDS Licensing Manager installed... d*ckhead... Now in the middle of standing up a server 2016 DC lol Damn you Microsoft and not allowing to add newer RDS licenses to an older RDS Licensing Server!

I love DA but it's a sh*t if the users BB is cr*p in the first place and also the IPv4 to IPv6 translations still take a bit of time regardless of Microsoft's "seamless" claim. RDS is defo the way forward as people can utilise their own kit at home whatever it may be thanks to Microsoft RDClient App. DA is good for those end users that feel they "have" to have a school laptop even though they logon to PC's in classrooms every lesson and the only place the laptop lives is at their house and they couldn't possibly use their own! Its also good for SEN students who require a laptop for home use and we provide them through funding yet want to manage the laptop fully still not allowing them to install cr*p at home and purposely forcing them back through our internal Smoothwall proxy, our device our rules!

Remote Desktop is the only way and is fantastic at the moment, why are you looking to change? Could it be that you are running an old RDS setup that could do with an overhaul...

Yes standard does give you 2 VM's in its license but only when it's the host, you should not be using standard to license 2 VM's when it's not the host that's what datacenter is for and allows for unlimited VM's whether it's the host or not. It's deep down in MS T's and C's I remember reading years ago. It doesn't help either that Microsoft Licensing resellers don't fully understand all the aspects themselves leaving the like of us a lot of reading and understanding if you want to be truely compliant.

@CAWJames - Just call them, use option 4 and give them your VL number, they do it over the phone in 3 mins.

You have 2 ways of licensing in your setup now i know your running the free Hyper-V version. 1. Buy a total of 4 standard licenses (1 for each VM) but you will never be able to setup a cluster for failover and any additional VM's will require a standard license - Not great... 2. Buy a datacenter license to cover your host and unlimited VM's, will also cover you for clustering failover and can make your servers into a SDDir cluster - Perfect... In order to swap editions on the fly you can use a DISM /online command, look back at page 2/3 of this thread for an example of swapping 2016 Eval to Datacenter.

Warning to anyone out there, Standard/Datacenter and Multipoint (WTF is Multipoint?!) are now all the same ISO, i initially thought my Datacenter ISO was missing but it is no longer a seperate ISO. The Microsoft licensing team only just worked this one out on the phone with me also.

Confused by how your describing your setup. Core is just a version of install (EG. Core vs GUI) whereas Datacenter vs Standard are an Edition, both standard and datacenter can have core install. The link below explains it easily with diagrams and I refer people to this to properly understand but this easiest way to refer to the Edition licensing is by asking the simple question "Do you need a host with more than 2 VM's (doesn't matter if its Hyper-V, Xenapp or VMWare)", if Yes than you need Datacenter, if no then you can use Standard with licenses you for 2 virtual's (but only if its a Hyper V host). Hyper-V and Guest Virtualization Licensing My setup is a 3 server VMware host cluster, I run 3x DL380's which have dual Hex Core CPU's. Server 2012 R2 and below license on per CPU so for 3 dual core hosts I needed 6 licenses, 1 license per cpu across 3 servers. This allowed me unlimited VM installs, I'm just not using Hyper-V as the host platform. - If I brought Standard edition as my host is NOT Hyper-V the Standard license would allow for 1 VM in VMware world but than that VM could be a Hyper-V host in itself and I could run 2 Hyper-V VM's in that 1 VMware VM (nested VM's, messy, complicated and a waste of resources). - If my 3 servers were to run Windows as my Hypervisor and utilize Hyper-V i would need the same licensing as details above, 6x datacenter licenses - If i brought Standard edition and used that as my servers hypervisor I would need to buy 6 licenses (again per cpu, 3x dual cpu = 6) however each host is officially only licensed for 2 VM's As for Server 2016 moving forward its not CPU based licensing anymore its core and its in bundles: - Each processor must be licensed for at least 8 cores - Every server must be licensed for at least 16 cores (this is equivalent to previous versions that requires two sockets minimum to be covered) - Core licenses are sold in packs of two which means the minimum number for each server is 8 2-core packs So for my next renewal of ESS I will need to buy 8 core packs of 2016 per server covering me up to 16 cores totals which works out at 2x Octo Core CPU's even though I only have 2x Hex core CPU's. Reason for this, server CPU cores are increasing drastically. EDIT - @jmak - Only convert your DC licenses to Standard if you are running 2 VM's under a Hyper V host otherwise you are not properly licensed. If you are using another Hypervisor and wanted to downgrade from DC you would need to buy 1 standard license for each VM to be properly licensed. EDIT 2 - But while this is all relevant and you are supposed to follow these Licensing rules by Microsoft 90%+ of organisations whether it be businesses or schools don't follow this and their licensing does not match their installs, I've done enough consulting to know this and when trying to advise them that they SHOULD change they never do because they see the bigger cost of their incorrect licensing and think they can carry on as is as it works. Take Unified Messenger in Exchange that needs a normal cal and an Enterprise cal or even S4B which requires a normal cal and an enterprise cal for calling to PSTN. I solved all our Exchange licensing issues by simply farming it all out to Office 365 and using the free Exchange Online plan 1 for normal mailboxes and the £0 cost Exchange Online plan 2 for unified messaging mailboxes, ow and don't forget the Exchange server cal license too, saved a good couple £2.3k per annum. Just because you can do it because Microsoft don't set hard limits in their licensing when activating features doesn't mean to say you should do it and don't need to be licensed for it.

It was reasonable but now increases due to server having Hex core+ cpu's now so the pricing is brought in core packs not cpu packs. Windows Server 2016 Licensing and Pricing | Thomas Maurer

Don't use DC if you haven't brought the appropriate licensing through your VLSC, Datacenter costs A LOT more than Standard

Datacenter is for VM hosting and subsequent VM's while standard is your normal. You need to use whatever you have paid for as part of your licensing agreement.

SSD not to be confused with the actual storage drive (need to come up with a better acronym for Storage Spaced, SSDir?) is great having played with it. I love the fact that using SSD's and regular SAS server drives (which are usually either 10k or 15k rpm) to form a SAN cluster across multiple servers is now a reality however disk space is an issue I foresee. Server disks whether its SSD or SAS are usually not that big and when they are they cost £££ Take for example my DL380's G7 (I think, cant remember, need more coffee!). They can hold 8 drives if I remember rightly, 2 of which straight away would be used in a Raid 1 for the base OS on the server leaving me with 6. So I potentially have 6 drives, 2 SSD's and 4 SAS to use in the SSDir Configuration, the SSD's are 128gb and the SAS 256gb. Now i know upon setting up the cluster and configuring SSDir you can then start implementing De-Duplication which I already use on the Hyper-V hosts running the RDSH VM's which compresses a lot but it would need some serious number crunching to work out the fine details of a large scale deployment to compensate a SAN. At present I have 2 SANS (Coraid, *yucK*) in a mirror config with 16x 2TB 7200rpm drives due to storage demands of VM's, my file server being the main culprit like everyone else. It all boils down to performance and cost of SSDir in comparison to picking up a fairly decent SAN and some drives.

The process mentioned previously does work to flip it from evaluation to Live. I already have 4 RDS farm servers up and running in Live production and about to stand up my new DC next week.

No GUI does speed things up drastically and requires less resources. I have always been in the same boat as yourself up til now and will be pushing a few servers like DC's etc... over to no GUI

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-docs/get-started/installation-options-for-windows-server-2016-technical-preview They sneakily updated Technet and warn its all gone. There is now just Core, GUI and Nano which has to be chosen at install. Uninstalling and re-installing GUI's introduced in 2012 is now gone again. So just like the full screen metro start menu that Microsoft decided to U-Turn on so have they with installing/uninstalling GUI's on servers.

It was more the fact that it was always there and covered the bases for everything however i have just stumbled across this :- https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/nanoserver/2016/10/04/appreciating-the-windows-server-2016-desktop-experience/ So i'm at a loss as to whether they have decided last minute to pull the feature completely and it is now just on/off at install ?

Having just read the article that's purely just a MS change to cover licensing and allow VDI in Azure, has nothing to do with the Desktop Experience feature other than the mention of it being improved. Last time i tested TP 4 or 5 (cant remember which) the feature was still there, this time in the Eval there physically isn't a User Interface option. Why they would of removed it from Eval is beyond me?! Also due to the Graphical User Interface main options missing from the feature list you cannot remove and add the GUI on the fly.

So having just sat down to mock up my first 2016 RDS session host I thought I would start by adding the Desktop Experience feature, guess what's missing from the add-feature list, it just isn't there! So there's the first crucial missing part in the eval...