2016 RDSSH on bare metal with GPU?

Hi all,

Has anyone been testing 2016 session hosts using a hardware gpu? (no hypervisor, straight bare metal deployment)

I've just ordered a dell M630 blade with Nvidia Grid 2.0 card. Hoping to leverage some of the new RDS features in 2016 to see if I can get 3D graphics over a desktop session.

Kinda wish I hadn't sold my GTX980 as I'd use my own PC for a demo

Assume this will only work (if at all) with Windows 10 1511 client

Thanks!

seems Microsoft themselves are confused about this (well, at least the person who answered the phone was).

Think whilst the server sku is now enabled for GPU it still needs to be a VM. Going to test two servers, with and without HyperV.

Have a dual 10 core xeon beast coming this week with quadro graphics

Small world! Good to speak to you earlier Glen - I'm actually leaving that particular company on Friday but if you're posting on here then I'll try and help out if I can. Will be interested to hear how the testing goes

oh wow, I've spoken to a fellow ocuker in the real world

I'll let you know how it goes, and great speaking with you

Very impressed with server 2016

Session Host VM without RFX playing HD video 75% CPU
Same server with RFX 35% CPU

That's with an entry level Quadro on a precision workstation for testing

good to see some others are trying/testing this as well. I had server 2016 TP5 ruining on a dell r620 sever a while ago for testing RDS, but unfortunately it crashed after connecting about 6 sessions! we will be coming back to this in the Autumn. the Boss is also interested in fully fledged VDI whit GRID and vmware view as well, so we will see.

glen, any pointers to a guide on how you setup the testing environment, do Microsoft have any guides you have found yet or are we waiting till September when the final version of 2016 is out?

I have my first MCSE 2012 exam next week as well, so revision time for that this weekend!

Dan Stockwell
Desktop & Systems engineer

Hi Dan,

Sorry for the late reply, I've just got back from Holiday

as expected, the information coming out of MS and general IT forums is really quite shocking. It's the same as 2012 (ie, nobody knows so spouts rubbish)

from what I can gather

RemoteFX on HyperV does indeed support a Server 2016 VM, however the kicker is that it does not support a multi user environment solution so RDS-SH is a no-go

HyperV using DDA (direct device assignment) is a new technology which passes the GPU through the PCI bus straight to the VM. I'm led to believe that it will support session hosts. Now the big question is, if true, will bypassing HyperV altogether and building a bare metal session host server with a GPU work. The difficulty is knowing if/how it works. Most clients support RemoteFX, but this isn't using remoteFX at all, so I do not understand at this point how it all works.

I'll build a new server this week and see what happens.

What I have seen though, is a reduction in CPU load but I need to do more testing before I can see for certain.

I think I may have to admit defeat. The technology (even in 2016) just isn't ready from Microsoft.

Unless you are running VDI, you can forget about any multimedia or graphics streaming

If I do hit gold I'll report back.

Im sure i will be revisiting this with the RTM 2016 when its available, but yea, full VDI with windows 10 clients is the ideal setup!

all costs £££

It does, the licence costs alone for us is £1 million moving to Citrix or Horizon. Not gonna happen, nor is sticking with windows clients.

I have a conference call this afternoon, will let you know how it goes.