Last month I talked about hyperbole in the technology world, and how technology advancements can be considered "game changers" for businesses. In that installment, Office 365 was the focus. This month, my focus turns to the newly-released Windows Server 2016, and specifically, the use of Server 2016 as a Remote Desktop Server. Is this the next game changer? For some industries, it just might be.
Access to company programs and data from a remote location has been a primary driver of Remote Desktop Server use for many years. With Remote Desktop, and with similar solutions like Citrix, a remote user connects to a session running in the corporate office or data center. All the processing happens on the company server, with the remote computer acting as the video display, and relaying keyboard/mouse input from the user back to the session on the server.
These remote solutions provide security, administration, and performance benefits that have made them popular and practical solutions for a lot of organizations. There is certainly nothing new about that. However, graphics performance in a Remote Desktop session, while perfectly fine for standard office programs like word processing, accounting, spreadsheets, etc., has never been optimal for graphics-intensive tasks like AutoCAD, video and photo editing, for example. Windows Server 2016 promises to break through that limitation.
Three advances in Windows Server 2016 are aimed directly at improving graphics performance and compatibility with a larger universe of graphics-intensive applications:
- RemoteFX vGPU: RemoteFX has been expanded to include OpenGL and OpenCL support, and the vGPU allows multiple Virtual Machines (VM) to share the same physical GPU for graphics acceleration. Up to 4K resolution is now supported also.
What this means for your business
Applications such as AutoCAD and Adobe Photoshop can now be enhanced by a graphics card, and audio/video performance is smooth and not jerky even in a remote session.
- Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Graphics Compression: Windows Server 2016 now implements full-screen AVC 444 mode, which reduces the bandwidth required, provides a better high-resolution experience, and also supports offloading some tasks to the remote client's graphics hardware.
What this means for your business
Someone using remote desktop has a better experience with less bandwidth, your business can do more with less.
- Discrete Device Assignment (DDA): In Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V, some PCI Express devices like GPUs can be passed through directly to a single guest VM, while loading the hardware vendor's native GPU driver (Intel, AMD, NVIDIA) in the guest VM. This increases application compatibility. DDA also allows sharing the graphics card capabilities among multiple RD sessions running within the same VM.
What this means for your business
Programs running in virtual machines and remote sessions can make full use of a graphics card, enabling you to remotely run even more programs with dependencies on native graphics drivers.
We are always looking for ways to enhance the way our clients operate their businesses, so this is an exciting time for us. These enhancements mean that engineering and design workers will be able to work remotely with their graphics-intensive applications. Businesses will be able to host these applications, as well, which opens up some interesting use cases and possibilities to optimize spending on high-end hardware.
If this sounds like a solution your business might benefit from, drop me a line or give me a call, and let's talk about your situation.