Remote Desktop Services and HyperV

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21/05/2021, 06:19 AM DonutKing - First post

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[DonutKing]

I'm working on a plan for a refresh of our environment at work. Unfortunately, as with many small businesses, our budget is 'as little as possible'.

I'm thinking of moving our PC's over to a Remote Desktop Services environment. Mainly to reduce costs of refreshing PC's but also to reduce IT staff workload - hopefully less time spent fixing and supporting the PCs. We'd also like to use RD gateway and web access for remote access - currently staff have to use a VPN client which they find a bit clunky.

I'm also looking at Hyper-V for our server environment. We've got 6 aging Windows 2003R2 servers doing various things from file, print, mail, SQL and IIS. They aren't really working very hard, most are running at less than 10% CPU and have 1-2GB RAM free (out of 4GB). When the backups aren't running we are looking at a peak total of 40-50MB/s of disk usage, and about 1500 IOPS (60-70% write).
However the main impetus for Hyper-V is to take advantage of Hyper-V Replica for disaster recovery purposes. Currently our DR is pretty lacking, there's only 2 servers there and there's no replication set up and I'm hoping with HyperV Replica we can basically mirror our entire environment.

. A NAS or SAN is out of the budget , So what I was thinking was getting a few grunty servers and loading them up with a dozen or so SAS drives in RAID10, and running HyperV off the local disks. 2 at head office and one at the DR site, and use HyperV replica to mirror to the DR server.

So what I'm thinking at the moment is:
-Anyone done a migration from desktop PC's to RDS? Any pitfalls or heartaches?

-Do you virtualize your RDS session hosts or keep them bare metal?

-What sort of specs would you expect for RDS session hosts running ~85 users? usage is mainly web applications and office.

-Would you run HyperV with local disk storage?

-Any pitfalls with HyperV replica?


I know I could call a system integrator like DiData or something for this but I hate dealing with sales people

[Eject]

No, but are you just planning on making images of the current systems and uploading them or starting fresh? If fresh, then its cake.

If you have the server power, virtual or not will work fine. Virtual will just allow you control them easier.

Not sure on usage, knowing Microsoft, they should have some sort of document with average usage for types of users.

Yep, as long as you have some redundancy.

Never used it, but I would assume not.

And move to server 08 at the least

And to think im about to get a diploma on this stuff

[Alucard]

the things you have to do when you don't have a budget to update the stuff you have.

i use hiper v for some stuff at work and the main pain i have is getting them to up date it (it is firefox) and the plugins. mind you i use it on a domain with the big budget of an international gas company.

i know citrix looks good untill you start using it for everything and then it becomes a pain to use (looks at vergil)

[CordlezToaster]

I'm working on a plan for a refresh of our environment at work. Unfortunately, as with many small businesses, our budget is 'as little as possible'.

I'm thinking of moving our PC's over to a Remote Desktop Services environment. Mainly to reduce costs of refreshing PC's but also to reduce IT staff workload - hopefully less time spent fixing and supporting the PCs. We'd also like to use RD gateway and web access for remote access - currently staff have to use a VPN client which they find a bit clunky.

I'm also looking at Hyper-V for our server environment. We've got 6 aging Windows 2003R2 servers doing various things from file, print, mail, SQL and IIS. They aren't really working very hard, most are running at less than 10% CPU and have 1-2GB RAM free (out of 4GB). When the backups aren't running we are looking at a peak total of 40-50MB/s of disk usage, and about 1500 IOPS (60-70% write).
However the main impetus for Hyper-V is to take advantage of Hyper-V Replica for disaster recovery purposes. Currently our DR is pretty lacking, there's only 2 servers there and there's no replication set up and I'm hoping with HyperV Replica we can basically mirror our entire environment.

. A NAS or SAN is out of the budget , So what I was thinking was getting a few grunty servers and loading them up with a dozen or so SAS drives in RAID10, and running HyperV off the local disks. 2 at head office and one at the DR site, and use HyperV replica to mirror to the DR server.

So what I'm thinking at the moment is:
-Anyone done a migration from desktop PC's to RDS? Any pitfalls or heartaches?

-Do you virtualize your RDS session hosts or keep them bare metal?

-What sort of specs would you expect for RDS session hosts running ~85 users? usage is mainly web applications and office.

-Would you run HyperV with local disk storage?

-Any pitfalls with HyperV replica?


I know I could call a system integrator like DiData or something for this but I hate dealing with sales people

I've done a migration to vmware view 4 with pcoip and im now looking @ horizon. I dont know too much about RDS and hyper V as im mostly working with VMware. But im not sure if the newer version of RDS has the same limitations as terminal services had/has in that the sessions couldn't play video and the max fps was around 16-18fps which meant scrolling through pdfs and watching videos was shitty. (maybe different now).

Things are starting to heat up in the san space im not sure what your budget is but have you looked at nutanix?, its pretty much a datacentre in a box. You could easily get something for around $50-60k that would run it all.
Maybe even a dyi san like elvis did over on ocau using gluster.

i gotta go do some work now

[DonutKing]

I've been following the OCAU BE&C section for a while now. My understanding of Gluster is that its more about a high-availability, distributed file system, whereas I'm more interested in disaster recovery.

I was reading the thread about nutanix, I think I will investigate this some more.

Your point about RDS performance is a good one, I know people working at a few places using terminal services but they all use Citrix. I see in 2012R2 they have RemoteFX but I don't know how this compares to Citrix performace. The CEO is making noise about video conferencing (yet he won't spend money to replace 6 year old servers or 10 year old switches, sigh) so this could be an issue in the future.

It sounds like you've got a full VDI implementation? I don't think we're going that far at this point, just using RDS and RemoteApp.

[CordlezToaster]

Yeah we have a full vdi deployment. Suits us because it so versatile with phones, tablets, pc's macs etc.

I'm in the midst of our DR deployment. Were using Veeam and a mixture of san to san replication across two sites.

The CEO is making noise about video conferencing (yet he won't spend money to replace 6 year old servers or 10 year old switches, sigh) so this could be an issue in the future.

Nothing makes a CEO give you money quicker than failing hardware ;-).

Have you thought of asking this on the Reddit sysadmin section?.
 

[MrX]

Mate it really depends on budget. Really, there are multiple ways of doing it but as Alucard said you will need to update what you have first before doing this. Virtual is prolly the best way to go for Admin/Management and redundancy.

Just setup 1020 seat VDI using 3yr old HP desktops with boot to SAN and will replace them in future with Wyse terminals.

Text me tomorrow and I'll send you the business plan I wrote up.

[DonutKing]

[Psych0Kyller]

Yeah my knowledge on Hyper V is very tiny because we have VMware/ESXI as our virtual server solution and it works really well.
Using Vsphere/Vcenter to manage vm's is a breeze.

If you feel that Citrix is the way to go all i can say is make sure its the latest version and is setup properly.
So many of our clients use outdated versions of citrix on shitty 2003 servers and wonder why there are issues.

[DonutKing]

For people that run VDI, what sort of specs are the servers that run the client VM's? What cpu, ram, disk resources do you budget for each user?

(I know this will vary with each individual use case but I'd like to hear what other people are doing too)