Anyone who has ever tried to run anything with a high graphics content in a remote desktop (RDP) session will know how poor the performance is, video clips can be measured in frames per minute rather than frames per second.

Microsoft may just have a solution for this in SP1 of Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 which is to be released 1st quarter next year.  The new enhnacement to RDP called RemoteFX will offer LAN users  a gui experience more akin to a physical desktop than which can currently be achieved using an RDP session. RemoteFX support will be included in  RDP 7.1 clients which currently is only available in the release candidate of 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows 7 SP1, next year expect more hardware vendors to release thin clients with RDP 7.1 support, can’t find any information regarding a 7.1 client being released for XP or Vista.

RemoteFX can work in 2 modes both requiring 2008 R2 SP1 on your host, the 1st mode allows users who RDP to the server directly to experience improved graphical performance, the 2nd mode which requires HyperV running on the host allows the hosts GPU ( graphics card ) to be virtualised and shared amongst Windows 7 SP1 VM’s running on the host.  From what I have read the 2nd mode offers better performance as it utilises the power of the hosts GPU whereas the 1st mode relies on software only to achieve the boost in graphical performance, the MS site does however mention using a dedicated RemoteFX encoder card installed in the host to boost performance, don’t know if these are available at present .

I decided to setup a test server to evaluate the graphical perfomance boost RemoteFX offers Windows 7 SP1 VM’s.   There are a few pre-requisites when choosing hardware for a RemoteFX host, firstly you need a CPU with SLAT support, I first tried a quad core Intel 6600 with no luck, you are looking at higher end Intel i series CPU’s or Intel Xeon 5500 or above, see extract below taken from MS site:-

SLAT-enabled processor   The processor in the RemoteFX server must support Second-Level Address Translation (SLAT). In virtualization scenarios, hardware-based SLAT support improves performance. On Intel processors, this is called Extended Page Tables (EPT), and on AMD processors, it is called Nested Page Tables (NPT).

Secondly you are going to require a decent GPU, remember your GPU’s processing power and video memory is going to be virtualised and shared amongst your VM’s.  The minimum memory requirement is 400MB of dedicated video memory, the table below (taken from MS site) shows video memory requirements for different screen resolutions, multiply this be number of VM’s you intend on running:-

For my test server I used a HP ML350 G6 with a single Intel 5520 quad core with Hyper Threading enabled. GPU was a modest Nvidia Geforce GT240 1GB which can be picked up for around £60.

Server was loaded with a fresh install of 2008 R2 and then had the RC of SP1 applied, HyperV role added and RemoteFX role added which is found as a component of the Remote Desktop Services role.

Created a Windows 7 Enterprise VM ( apparently requires Enterprise or Ultimate ), and added the new RemoteFX 3D Video adapter to the virtual machine, before doing this make sure you have enabled remote desktop in the virtual machine as once the RemoteFX adapter is added you will no longer be able to access the VM’s console through HyperV manager.

As the RDP 7.1 client is only available on SP1 and I didn’t have a spare PC available to load another copy of Windows 7 SP1 I was forced to RDP from the 2008 R2 SP1 host to the Windows 7 VM, to enable the RemoteFX on the RDP client make sure that the experience setting within the RDP client is set to LAN.

Once connected I can tell straight away the visual improvement, Windows 7 AERO is running, let’s try something a bit more intesive and use the Aero 3D flip feature, impressed runs as smoothly as I’ve seen on any physical desktop.

RemoteFX Windows 7 Aero Flip

So what about video in our RDP session, obtained a HD (720p) mkv file,  installed K-Lite codec pack into the VM and luached the video clip in Media Player Classic. The video played back suprisingly well with only the ocassional torn frame, running HD video in an RDP session is probably not what you would expect to find in a typical business environment but if it can handle the rendering of HD content then it should have no problems with lower quality video such as the likes of YouTube.

RemoteFX HD Video Rendering

So how about some heavy 3D content, installed a copy of 3DMark06 into the VM to test how it handles heavy 3D game type rendering. I was quite suprised the test ran at all and didn’t bomb out when it saw the virtualised GPU, although the 3D tests ran there was a very noticeable difference in frame rates achieved running the tests within the virtual machine as opposed to running it directly on the host. For example the 1st 3D test shows a battle scene in a space dock, in the virtual machine the average frame rate was around 12 fps, running the same test on the physical host showed and average frame rate of around 30 fps. Hardcore gamers are not going to want to run on virtualised PC’s at the moment but that’s not what RemoteFX was designed to do.

Where RemoteFX will appeal is in VDI implementaions where users want a more dynamic gui experience from their PC/Thin Client than is currently offered by the RDP. With this in mind let’s try scaling out a little, I’ve made another 3 copies of our Windows 7 SP1 VM and powered them all up (4 total).

Windows and Aero still behaving themselves nicely no noticeable degradation with 4 VM’s running. Launched the HD video in all 4 VM’s and although it did play it was more jerky than running it in a single VM, clearly running 4 HD movies even on a physical host on a low end video card would be pushing it. Also bear in my all 4 VM’s and the host are running off a single SATA disk so that would probably also degrade the performance somewhat. Still watchable, very impressive.

RemoteFX on 4 VM's playing HD videos

With another CPU and a higher end GPU (RemoteFX supports up to 4 in the same host) we should be able to a acheive a decent VM density on our host.

Often Microsoft are playing catchup with VMware but in regards to RemoteFX I think they are on to a winner, although VMware with it’s View product supports rich graphical sessions using PCoverIP to get decent performance is going to require a PCoverIP offload card and also the licensing costs involved with implementing the VMware infrastructure and VMware View.

I’ve blogged before regarding the VMware Essentials product which offers the power of virtualisation at a price point more appealing to SME customers.

VMware have now made this even more attractive by now offering vMotion support in the Essentials Plus package something which was previously unavailable in the Essentials packages.

For a full comparison of what’s available in the various Essentials packages visit the VMware website:

VMware vSphere Kits Features List

Have a script that automatically creates a VM prompts for memory size, number of CPU’s etc.

Worked fine on HyperV in 2008 SP2, but was getting intermitent failures on 2008 R2.

After a little bit of head scratching found out it was failing setting memory size to an odd number (e.g 2047 MB), worked fine when setting even number memory (e.g 2048 MB).

When trying to manually create a VM on R2 with an odd number for memory size get the error below “Please enter memory in increments of 2 MB” , easy to fix just use an even size for memory.

A 2008 server with the Hyper-V role sometimes hangs at  Shutting Down and a power cycle is required to restart it.   This appears to occur with some servers due to BIOS incompatability, have read on some forums that upgrading to lastest motherboard BIOS has resolved issue.

Personally had this happen on servers fitted with Supermicro X7DWU motherboards, problem continues after lastest BIOS installed running Windows 2008 SP2 and all relevant patches.

This is a real pain when remote booting servers as they never come back online.

No shutdown issues on HP ML350 G5 and  HP XW4600 worksation in my test environment.

Maybe Microsoft will bring out a patch !

On several occasions have received a ‘Fatal Error’ when trying to install Integration Components  into a Hyper-V Virtual Machine.

This seems to happen when upgrading from a previous version or in my test lab when I have been doing some P2V testing.

Uninstalling Hyper-V Guest Components using Add/Remove programs doesn’t fix problem.

Only way I’ve found to fix problems is to delete the following 2 files (recommend doing a snapshot first just in case).

C:\Windows\system32\drivers\wdf01000.sys and  C:\Windows\system32\drivers\wdfldr.sys

You should then be able to install Integration Components.

One of the interesting things coming up in VMware Infrastructure 4 or vSphere as it is now known is the new licensing options aimed at securing a bigger slice of the lucrative SME marketplace.

Many SME’s were put off on the pricing of VMware Infrastructure 3 with Enterprise and Virtual Centre licences for a couple of ESX hosts not leaving you much change out of £10k.

vSphere will introduce an essentials and essentials plus which will offer a reduced feature set compared to the higher end vSphere offerings. Link below shows vSphere version comparison chart.

vSphere version comparison

Although the essentials plus offering has VMware HA it is missing vMotion, DRS and the newly introduced vSphere fault tolerance, which I feel is a bit strange considering the essentials package covers licensing for 3 ESX hosts. Microsoft will include their vMotion equivalent for Hyper-V in Windows 2008 R2 so could make the essentials package a little less attractive to customers who are looking for the ability to live migrate VM’s between hosts.

Pricing for the essentials plus package is showing as $2995, this includes licenses for 3 physical hosts and vCentre Server for essentials to handle management.

Release date stated as May 21st .

Software company Veeam have today released v3 of their free FastSCP program which now supports coping files to and from ESXi hosts without any hacking or modification required on ESXi.

The solution is able to copy powered off virtual machines to or from a Windows machine, jobs can be scheduled if required.

On testing managed a very respectable performance of 28 MB/s from an ESXi host running SATA disk across a gigabit network, certainly faster than any other solution I’ve seen for ESXi.

For those of you looking for a backup solution for VMware Virtual Infrastructure they also do a pay solution called Veeam Backup which rivals Vizioncores backup solution.

www.veeam.com

So you’ve loaded Hyper-V, created your virtual machine and loaded Windows server onto the virtual machine.  You are using remote desktop to connect to your Hyper-V host and power  on the virtual machine.

The first thing you’ll notice when you try to use the mouse is that you’ll receive the message popup “Mouse not captured in Remote Desktop Session”, and instead of a mouse pointer will just get a dot in it’s place. Have noticed when using  3rd party remote control software, logmein in my case I was able to see a mouse pointer but still not control it.

This is really frustrating for those of  us who have used VMware where the mouse works straight away (albeit jerky until VMware tools installed).

The way to get the mouse working under a Hyper-V VM is to install  Microsoft Virtual Machine Integration Services into the VM.  As you have no mouse you will need to use the keyboard to login and start the install, a list of common windows key combinations is shown below. Once logged in from the VM connection window click on the ‘Actions’ menu and select ‘Insert Integration Services Setup Disk’ from the drop down list, this will load the install disk into the virtual CD drive of your VM from where the install can be started.  Once installed you’ll get control of your mouse back.

I’d tried VMware server 2 back in beta but found I couldn’t get on with the new management web interface so stuck with my trusted VMware server 1.0.x

A colleague mentioned recently VMware Server 2 could be managed using the familair VI client usually used to manage ESX hosts.

Sure enough after downloading and installing the latest version of VMware server 2 was able to connect to it using VI client by pointing it to the server IP on port 8333  , in my case VI client was running on the same machine as VMware server so pointed the VI client to 127.0.0.1:8333 , used my Windows login name and password and bingo managing VMware server using VI client, I’m finally happy to upgrade to VMware Server 2.

If you don’t already have VI client installed you can download it by pointing your web browser to to the IP of your VMware server host using the URL:

https://127.0.0.1:8333/client/VMware-viclient.exe

If you are running ESX or ESXi U2 or above and have an application that creates VMware backups using snapshots (e.g Vizioncore , Veeam ) you may notice sometimes you are left with a snapshot called Consolidated Helper Snapshot followed by a number.

If you try to remove the snapshot on a powered on VM it will fail (hangs at 95% ) and you may find that when you right click the virtual machine in VI client you can no longer power off the virtual machine and most of the other settings are greyed out.

Saw this happen to a VM running on an ESXi host after aborting a backup script, only thing I could do was reboot the ESXi host and remove the snapshot whilst the VM was powered off, all OK then.

These helper snapshots from what I can determine are designed to reduce the impact of VM snapshots locking a live VM but may occasionally not get removed correctly after the removal of the main VM snapshot.