RDmi, HTML5, Project Honolulu & Benchmarking!

Experts 2 Experts Virtualization

November 18th was Experts 2 Experts Virtualization (E2EVC) Conference time again! This edition was being held in Barcelona. Great location for the 36th edition of this event with attendees coming from 19 different countries! I presented a session together with Benny Tritsch and in this blog post I want to elaborate some more on what we presented. Our session title was called “Microsoft RDS, current state and future vision”.

When we created the abstract for our session somewhere last summer, we came up with the idea to present a session showing the latest evolution of the Remote Desktop Platform. Back then, we weren’t really sure if we would be able to show it or even be allowed talk about it because back then this was all very early stage. Fortunately, 3 weeks before the E2EVC event in Barcelona we were able to get the bits of the very first RDmi Private Preview and successfully installed it in our labs. We contacted the RDS Product Team and they gave us permission to demo both RDmi and HTML5 at E2EVC last week! So, during the session we covered these 4 major topics

Remote End User Experience benchmarking

We started the session by covering Remote End User Experience Benchmarking and talked about the importance of benchmarking the perceived end user experience. We showed demos of a Rex Analytics, a framework and toolset that allows you to Build, Measure and Analyze the user experience. Using the REX Analyzer, we’re able see and compare the end users experience and include & correlate to the telemetry data by showing the resources consumed by the sessions. The REX Analyzer shows all of this in a single view 4-up player that allows easy playback & zooming.

Project Honolulu

We continued the session by covering Project Honolulu. This is the codename of the Web Based Interface to manage Windows Server going forward replacing many, many, many different tools we use today. Project Honolulu was introduced and talked about a lot at Microsoft Ignite. I tweeted some pictures while attending Jeff Woolsey session. In our session we did a live demo of Project Honolulu Preview and showing a couple of examples.

Remote Desktop Modern Infrastructure

Next, we covered Remote Desktop modern infrastructure (RDmi). RDmi is the latest evolution of the Remote Desktop Services platform. It basically means that the RDS Infrastructure roles like RD Connection Broker, RD Web Access and RD Gateway are going to be transformed into .NET services. That means you no longer need to host, manage and maintain the Virtual Machines that hold these roles. You can directly purchase these roles from the Azure MarketPlace, or host these .NET services yourself. We started by explaining the RDmi Architecture covering the .NET services, the way the RD Session Host servers connect to the environment, how this platform allows for multitenancy and that the platform is based on Azure AD. It comes down to being; - More secure because of the out of box integration with AAD Conditional Access and MFA - More Cloud ready because it leverages PaaS components that automatically scale - Allowing all clients including a new HTML5 web client

Live demos!

After covering the architecture, the rest of the session was all based on live demos! We coved the Azure Portal showing how there are now zero Virtual Machines needed for the RDS Backend and how the entire backend is based on Azure App Services. We showed an example of what the Azure Dashboard could look like integrating telemetry data from the RDmi environment by simply dragging and dropping in these Azure App Service.

"We concluded our session with a live demo of the HTML5 Web Client which is available in RDmi as well as for RDS based on Windows Server 2016."

Thanks to everyone who attended the session, it was great to see that much interest. Also, a huge thanks to Alex Cooper, and crew for creating yet another awesome edition of E2EVC! If you are interested in attending the next edition, it will be held in Amsterdam June 8-10, 2018! Visit www.e2evc.com for more information! If you want more information on Remote Desktop modern infrastructure, HTML5, Project Honolulu or End User Experience benchmarking, feel free to reach out via freek.berson@wortell.nl