White hacker: What is Desktop virtualization?

What is desktop virtualization? Its many things to many people.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
Session Virtualization
RemoteApp

In this post we will only cover what desktop virtualization is and what components, needs and challenges are addressed by desktop virtualization.

The Microsoft Virtual Academy has a great jumpstart session on VDI. here is the overview recording.(see the link at the bottom of this post for the entire session)

VDI gives you the ability to store and offer full virtual machines (OS, Applications, Data…) on a server which may be accessed by multiple clients or devices.

Session Virtualization allows users to access entire desktops (remote desktops or “sessions”) running on servers in the datacenter. It’s Terminal Services on steroids.

RemoteApp allows you to deliver remote applications to users instead of full desktops. It enables a publishing process that allows apps on session or VDI hosts to be provided to users. It allows RemoteApps to run side by side with local apps and integrates with the Start menu to make it simple for users to find and launch RemoteApps.

In this post we’ll take a high level look at deploying VDI (full virtual machines) in Windows Server 2012. So let’s get going

1. Open Server Manager (ideally from the Server you want to host the Session Broker role), Click on Add Roles and Features , Select Remote Desktop Services Installation and Click Next

2. Select Deployment Type of Standard deployment

3. Select Virtual machine-based desktop Deployment and Click Next

4. Click Next on the Review of role Services screen

5. Specify which server to act as the RD Connection Broker Server and Click Next

6. Specify which server to act as the RD Web Access Server and Click Next

(In our example, we’re elected to host the RD Web Access role on the same host as the Session Broker role.)

7. Specify the RD Virtualization Host and Click Next

In our example we’re using the same host for all 3 roles. The Hyper-V role will be installed if it isn’t already.

8. Confirm Selection and check mark on Restart Destination Server automatically if Required, Click Deploy

After completion of this process, you have successfully deployed VDI desktop virtualization to this box. Now you need to configure the machine pool. That’s next…

Virtual Desktop Collection

There are two types of virtual desktop collections available: personal and pooled. You have the option to let Remote Desktop Services automatically manage pooled virtual desktops in a collection, or you can manually manage them. We will concentrate on automatically managed pooled virtual desktop collections.

A managed pooled virtual desktop collection offers the following capabilities:

Automatically create pooled virtual desktops based on a virtual desktop template.
Automatically install security updates and applications based on a virtual desktop template.
Live migration with local caching.
User profile disk support. A user profile disk stores user profile information in a separate virtual hard disk so that user profile settings are persistent across pooled virtual desktops.

With either managed or unmanaged, the administrator can configure the pool to store the user profiles on User Profile disks separate from the machines.

Create a Pooled – Managed Virtual desktop Collection

1. Open Server Manager, Click Remote Desktop Services and Select Overview