First published on CloudBlogs on Jul, 13 2010
In
March
, Microsoft announced RemoteFX and how it enables a rich desktop experience for endpoint devices ranging from traditional PCs to the most lightweight of thin client devices. Customers have since been eager to get their hands on the code.
Yesterday, at WPC, we announced
that RemoteFX is available to the public through Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta! We want to make sure that your testing of RemoteFX for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and session virtualization goes smoothly. Therefore, in this blog, we provide additional guidance on the documentation we’ve created for your beta testing.
To get started with RemoteFX, first identify the server and hardware that you’ll use. In the RemoteFX for RD Virtualization Host (RDVH) (VDI) scenario, the server must meet the requirements identified in the
hardware considerations
guide for Windows Server 2008 SP1. This includes CPU support for
SLAT
and up to 4 GPUs. (We discuss more about GPUs below.) For the RemoteFX for RD Session Host (session virtualization, formerly known as the Terminal Server) scenario, the server CPU must support SSE2 but GPUs are not required.
Our partners have blogged about GPUs that will work with RemoteFX in SP1 beta. For details, see
Max’s blog
post. The list of GPUs will continue to grow and evolve as we near our final release. To evaluate the beta, we recommend that you select GPUs from this list. We recommend the following drivers available from our partners: Nvidia drivers version 195.62 and 196.21, and ATI driver versions 8.720 and 8.723. We continue to work closely with all our partners to ensure that customers can reliably access drivers for their RemoteFX solutions, including through our participation in the next Logo kit.
At this time we are also publishing a set of documentation, listed below. We recommend that you start with the
hardware considerations guide
when beta-testing the VDI scenario, in order to understand server requirements and capacity planning for your virtual machines. We recommend that customers test the RemoteFX Beta with up to 12 users for each Enterprise class GPU.
You can then learn how to configure a single server in the
Deploying a Single RemoteFX Server Step-by-Step Guide
. For the session virtualization scenario with RD Session Host, you can jump directly into the
Using RemoteFX with “Classic” Remote Desktop Services Step-by-Step Guide
. The other documents provide overviews for the technology and detailed steps for configuring RemoteFX based on each scenario.
We appreciate your interest in RemoteFX and invite you to download and evaluate the beta. Please try out your use cases and scenarios by using this beta and post your feedback. Please post your queries on
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en/winserverTS/threads
or send an email to
remotefx@microsoft.com
The following list includes all the new documents available with the SP1 Beta:
