RDS 2012 R2 – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure – PART XI

LogoVDI_1a

Hello World,

I was hesitating about which topic to touch regarding Remote Desktop Services. We have already posted a lot of information about Remote Desktop Services and RemoteApp technology. However, we still need to cover some important topics such as high availability. On the other hand, Remote Desktop Services also provide VDI solutions for Enterprises which is a topic I’m finding more and more in my projects.

VDI is another aspect of the Remote Desktop Services and I think it’s important to show this aspect before talking about High availability. High availability and custom configurations can be touched after we have a global overview of the Remote Desktop Technology.

For people interested in an introduction of RDS and detailed information about RemoteApp, please review our previous posts on the subject

In this post, we will describe how you can setup a VDI infrastructure (the easy way)

VDI Overview

VDI Pool vs Personal Virtual Desktops

As mentioned earlier, RDS 2012 R2 provide VDI capability. VDI or Virtual Desktop infrastructure is basically a solution where a user will connect to a virtual machine using remote desktop client and access a full desktop environment. However, you can still make a additional distinction in VDI deployment.

In fact, Microsoft RDS 2012 R2 support two VDI deployment scenarios :

Virtual Desktop pools and,
Personal Virtual Desktops

The difference between the two scenarios is based on the way you assign virtual machines to end users. In a Personal Virtual Desktop scenario, a dedicated user will have access to a dedicated Virtual machine. In a VDI pool scenario; the virtual machines is not assigned specifically to one user but will be shared between multiple users.

Something I didn’t know is that there is an additional distinction made by Microsoft when talking about VDI pool. You can have

VDI managed pool
VDI umanaged pool

In the VDI Managed pool, we will create the VDI pool based on the VM template. The unmanaged scenario would be where we would simply add into a vdi collection an existing Virtual machine…

Pre-requisites for VDI and RDS 2012 R2

In our simple scenario, we will have only one server that will be used and where we will install the RDS components. Because we will be working with virtual machines, we will need to have

Hyper-v installed on the target RDS server.
a Virtual Machine template (which needs to be sysprepped)
Enough right in your Active Directory in order to delegate control to the OU where your virtual machines will be created.

When you have this, you should be ready to go and proceed with your installation.

Step by Step Installation Procedure

In this post, we will assume that we want to deploy the Remote Desktop Services on asingle Server. We want to demonstrate the installation. All the needed roles will be installed on a single server. In coming posts, we will have a look at a more complex deployment strategy. The single server installation is to get used to the new installation procedure and the new management tool. We also assume that you want to deploy VDI infrastructure and not the Remote Session based infrastructure.

We assume that you are familiar with the new RDMS management interface (if not, refer to the links above)

To perform the installation, you will proceed with the following actions :

Step 1 – Open Server Manager and click on Add Roles and features