I’m starting a new summer POC project building and deploying a new RDS platform. Hardware will be Dell Blade M630 servers running Windows Server 2016 TP5. They will have the RDS Session Host role installed.
Microsoft state that server 2016 now allows the use of hardware gpus without the need to install a hypervisor. You just need to set the group policy to enable hardware gpu under the remotefx section. This is great news for our environment were our usage is best suited to session desktops.
Would an Nvidia M6 Grid card enable the use of HD video through the session desktop to an end user thin client device? Ideally these will be Igel UD6 machines with the multimedia codec pack installed, however we will also be testing out Windows 10 1511 clients with mstsc.exe.
Currently we do not support Server 2016 as it is an unreleased product. You can evaluate it with the latest drivers, but there’s no guarantee of performance and we cannot provide assistance.
At present neither the M60 or the M6 are supported in "bare metal" deployments. Support for this functionality may be available in the future though I can’t provide specific details for the Dell blade.
As per server 2012 R2 RemoteFX sessions, as long as you have a full RemoteFX connection end to end then you will benefit from hardware acceleration. How much you’ll benefit by depends on the application and whether it will utilise the GPU for video acceleration. Generally speaking though, most organisations benefit from the GPU leading to a reduction in CPU overhead.
Can you recommend a graphics card which is supported on bare metal please. Ideally, one which fits an M630 blade server.
I have seen the Quadro K5100M 8GB which comes in a Mezz slot for the M630. Whilst the drivers only seem to support Windows 8 64bit, I have heard it will work on 2012 R2.
I would like to be able to evaluate 2016 with the latest drivers, but they do not install. It would be nice to have an early release driver to test as I have customers that are already asking me about server 2016 and K1 card for Citrix and graphics applications.