RemoteFX: Looks Great, But Will It Scale?

Microsoft in late July released a beta version of Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, just as it had promised to do at its Tech-Ed conference in June. And while the Windows 7 version contains nothing but bug fixes, server-side features for remote computing devices -- dynamic memory, USB redirect and remote graphics -- have had media outlets atwitter.

And with good reason. The enterprise has been clamoring for a means to deploy a rich thin-client experience, and Microsoft is poised to be the first to deliver one.

At the center of its solution is RemoteFX, an emerging technology that, in essence, “time-slices” the graphics processor installed in a server and divvies its power to virtual desktop instances managed by Hyper-V. As far as those instances are concerned, they’ve each got an ATI Radeon card installed locally, and the thin clients accessing them can render 2-D and 3-D CAD images, watch full-motion movies or games up to 1080p and full sound, or display anything else such a GPU could do.

Microsoft in June released its Remote Desktop Protocol 7.1 client to support the capability, and was demonstrating single-user AutoCAD and live animation to reporters at Tech-Ed. “When does that get scalable?” That was my question to Bill Laing, vice president of Microsoft’s Server and Solutions division, following the demo. “We’ve tested it with a number of clients simultaneously,” he said. When pressed for the actual number, he admitted that the number was “two.”

So again, when does RemoteFX become scalable? Mitch Furman, a product manager in AMD’s professional graphics group who works on remote graphics and graphics virtualization, characterizes RemoteFX as new and exciting. He also said he has no clear sense of its potential scalability. “We haven’t gone beyond two [remote users],” he said. “That’s working well, but we have not gone beyond two. So the question now is, ‘How many remote users can we support?’ [But] we’re fully committed to Microsoft in supporting it.”

We’re not betting against the return of the thin client. Quite the opposite, in fact. Some of Microsoft’s future vision of remote desktop computing is not only plausible, but seems quite likely. “We think that monitors will have a network port instead of a VGA port, and that the keyboard and mouse will hang right off of them,” said Laing. We agree, but would guess that the VGA port(s) will remain (and a KVM switch would be nice too). “Prices [will come] down quite a bit,” he added, going out on a limb.

Microsoft is betting that as virtualization continues to consolidate the data center, thin clients will become the new desktop -- supplanting the fat desktop client for enterprise computing. To that end, the company also has made strides addressing another limitation of the thin client -- that of support for local peripherals. Microsoft claims significant progress in development of USB redirection.

“In the past, we could redirect audio [data from], the clipboard and printers. But not Web cams, VoIP devices, headsets and Windows Mobile devices. Now we can,” said Justin Graham, a Windows Server senior product manager. Support also extends to mobile-device sync and multifunction printers, such as those that scan and fax.

Meanwhile, Redmond has joined AMD, IBM, Intel, Sun and others on the IOMMU, an AMD-led specification that maps device-visible virtual address to physical ones. According to Tim Meuting, an AMD product marketing manager who works with the technology, the IOMMU will complement RemoteFX by protecting the virtual instances being serviced by the transport protocol. “The IOMMU enables virtual software to assign guest OSes to a device, thereby bypassing the need for the hardware to get involved,” he explained.

The effort also is expected to address the memory corruption and I/O degradation that results from direct memory access from a virtualized operating system. An IOMMU already has been implemented in AMD’s 4000- and 6000-Series chipsets, and is accessed in varying degrees by VMware and Xen. “We’re working with Microsoft on the spec,” said Meuting. "But they have not adopted it at this point."

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