Hi, I’m Shanmugam Kulandaivel from the Remote Desktop team.
Remote Desktop Services (RDS) in Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 brought significant enhancements to the user experience, simplified RDS management and lowered the total cost of ownership. RDS in the next version of Windows Server builds on this strong foundation and adds support for the following scenarios.
- Enabling engineering and designer applications with OpenGL and OpenCL support: The next version of Windows Server adds full support for OpenGL (1-4.4) and OpenCL (1.1) . This enables customers to centralize commonly used engineering & design applications such Adobe Photoshop. RemoteFX vGPU in the next version of Windows Server also supports a larger dedicated video memory (VRAM) – up to 1 GB and administrators can configure the amount of VRAM for each virtual machine. In addition, we also made targeted performance, reliability and application compatibility changes.
- Simplifying single server deployments for education and retail scenarios by integrating Windows Multipoint Server (WMS) role within Windows Server : WMS is a basic, low-cost, single-server multi-user solution that enables customers to deploy a turnkey, highly durable, easy to manage solution to their sites – a ‘site’ being a location where all users are in the same physical premises. Multipoint is ideal for basic use case scenarios where (1) the server and the end user access device are in close proximity (physically connected or connected via LAN).(2) you don’t need Remote Desktop Broker or RD Gateway for your deployment. WMS stand-alone product has been providing great value for educational institutions. With the next version of Windows Server, MultiPoint is now broadly available for all commercial customers.
- Enabling users to be productive from their devices: In order to enable our users from a variety of different device platforms, we released Microsoft Remote Desktop apps for Windows Phone, iOS, Mac OS X, and Android. Since their launch more than six million users downloaded these apps! With the real time feedback from the application stores, we have been updating these apps every month. The major update for the iOS Remote Desktop Client that we released in September 2014 included several new features such as a multi-session support, performance improvements and availability in 15 languages.
As Brad Anderson outlines in his blog post on Desktop Virtualization , our vision is simple: enable customers to deliver mission critical desktop apps to their users, wherever those users are, and whatever devices they are using, in a protected and manageable way . We believe customers get maximum value from our solutions when they are able to choose how they want to deliver applications in order to best suit their business requirements and end users. To that end, we announced the preview of Microsoft Azure RemoteApp , an Azure-based service for delivering desktop applications. We also have technical architecture guides and scripts available for customers that want to run Windows Server 2012 R2 RDS and the next version of Windows Server run on Azure IaaS.
We are excited about the next version of Windows Server! Please download the bits, play with it and tell us what you think. And keep watching this space – we will blog about these new features in depth and delve in to the details.
- The Remote Desktop Team.
