{"id":830,"date":"2012-07-17T11:48:04","date_gmt":"2012-07-17T10:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/?p=830"},"modified":"2012-07-17T22:59:40","modified_gmt":"2012-07-17T21:59:40","slug":"custom-remotefx-rds-farm-farm-architecture-hardware-specs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myworldofit.net\/?p=830","title":{"rendered":"Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm – Farm Architecture + Hardware Specs"},"content":{"rendered":"
This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Following on from my first post<\/a>\u00a0I am going to look at what will make up by RemoteFX RDS farm including the software and hardware architecture.<\/p>\n

First I’ve started out as you would with any small RDS farm; in this case\u00a0with 4 session hosts<\/strong> and a single connection broker<\/strong> <\/strong>(which will also act as licence server). The 30 endpoints are pointed at the connection broker which then decides which session host they should be logging into.<\/p>\n

In my case the servers have only 2 hops between themselves and the endpoints over a fibre optic to a local network switch and then down copper 10\/100mb to the client. For the time being the endpoints are just re purposed PCs<\/strong> however we hope to replace them with dedicated thin clients<\/strong> (mainly for power saving reasons) in the next few months.<\/p>\n

The connection broker<\/strong> will be hosted as a virtual machine<\/strong> on one of our Hyper-V servers however to make use of RemoteFX technology<\/strong> (will go into this in a little more depth in a later post) the session hosts will all be running directly off physical hardware<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The hardware requirements for RemoteFX are quite specific<\/a> but not all that hard to meet using even desktop PC parts. The key thing is the CPU must support something called Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2), in this case I will be using AMD A8 Fusion APUs which do indeed support this feature. One thing to point out that also a GPU certainly helps<\/strong> (video decoding ect) its not a necessity<\/strong> however if you want any kind of semi decent performance you will want one. This differs from RemoteFX for VDI<\/strong> which does require a GPU<\/strong> and can even do 3D acceleration (RemoteFX for RDS Session Host only does 2D and no Aero Glass<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The full hardware specifications for the session hosts is below<\/p>\n