Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #4: Remote Desktop Services

Improved graphics, performance and cloud capabilities

This is post #4 in the “Ten Reasons You’ll Love Windows Server 2016” video series by Matt McSpirit, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft.

In today’s edition, Matt introduces you to Clark Nicholson, Principal Program Manager on the Remote Desktop Services (RDS) team. Clark talks about the powerful new areas of innovation his team is working on for Windows Server 2016 – graphics improvements, scale enhancements, and optimizations for the cloud. Together, these enhancements strengthen our trusted platform for partners to build secure, customized solutions for our customers.

Clark takes us through the significant performance and app compatibility improvements we have made in user experience, through the ground-breaking Direct Device Assignment (DDA) technology for graphics cards; this technology simultaneously provides the full power of available graphics processing to virtual desktops as well as session-based desktops and apps by surfacing the actual IHV’s GPU driver, which improves app compatibility. He also talks about the RemoteFX vGPU related investments including enhanced support for Open GL and Open CL.

In Windows Server 2016, the team has improved our Connection Broker capabilities to handle massively concurrent connection situations, commonly known as the “9 am scenario” or “log on storm”; RD connection broker has now been tested to handle 10K+ concurrent connection requests without failures. Clark also introduces the ability to configure a high availability RD Connection Broker using a database from a shared SQL server that allows smaller scale deployments to be cost effective.

No discussion of RDS in Windows Server 2016 can happen without addressing the cloud revolution. Microsoft has made huge strides in this regard, and we hear from Clark how RDS in Azure IaaS allows for much more efficient VM architecture than before, significantly reducing the number of VMs needed to set up a deployment. We also learn about integration with Azure Active Directory App Proxy that enhances security for cloud-based RDS deployments by reducing the attack surface. Further, Clark discusses integration with Azure Active Directory Domain Services, enabling “lift and shift” scenarios as our customers seek to leverage the power of the cloud without significant changes to their app configurations. This also opens up a large set of Azure Active Directory functionality like single sign on and multi-factor authentication.

RDS in Windows Server 2016 is a big step forward in Windows desktop and app virtualization; more importantly, it is a leap forward into the future of computing being defined by the hybrid cloud.

Learn more about these and other new RDS features in Windows Server 2016 on the RDS Team Blog.

Get more updates on Windows Server 2016 by following the Windows Server team (@WindowsServer) and Matt (@mattmcspirit) on Twitter.

Check out the other posts in this series:

• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #1: PowerShell and DSC
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #2: Active Directory and Identity
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #3: Server Management Tools
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #5: Software-defined storage
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #6: Software-defined Compute
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #7: Software-defined Networking
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #8: Security
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #9: Containers
• Ten reasons you’ll love Windows Server 2016 #10: Nano Server