Session Highlight: RDS on Azure or RDmi, Here’s What You Need To Know!

Howdy, it’s Aidan Finn from MicroWarehouse here. I had dabbled with Remote Desktop Services here and there over the years. Even when I joined MicroWarehouse, a distributor working with most of the Microsoft partners in Ireland, I still only touched RDS on rare occasions. But when we started working in Azure, wow, did that change.

From a very simple perspective, when you start working with Azure virtual machines, the cloud is “just another Hyper-V cluster”, albeit a very big one with lots more functionality than you could ever have on-premises. If you were to move some application/data from on-premises to Azure, you’ve increased the latency between the client and the service from under 1 millisecond to 30+ milliseconds – that’s OK for HTTP/S-based services but it’s a lot for legacy thick client/server applications. When faced with latent connections for thick clients, we’ve often employed Citrix/RDS to move the client app to the same location as the data/service and present the user experience on their device. And we can do that in Azure too – and it’s because of this that I’ve helped customers design & price more RDS deployments in the last 4 years than I had done in the previous 2 decades.

The design of RDS farms in Azure is no different to what they would be on VMware or Hyper-V – you still have the same number of machines, all doing the same roles, with the same amount of processor and RAM. That’s great for internal deployments, but the cost of running RDS infrastructures for managed services providers or ISVs (moving legacy software to Azure) for each customer/tenant could be prohibitive.

Microsoft showed something new at their Ignite conference in 2017. It was a refactoring of the RDS infrastructure roles for a hosted/managed multi-tenant/customer platform for services providers and ISVs called Remote Desktop Modern Infrastructure (RDmi). This solution, based on Azure App Services, provides a central shared RDS infrastructure, with each customer deployed in their own tenant/subscriptions for sessions/desktops and Active Directory Domain Services. This is a seriously cool rethinking of RDS, that I have customers lined up waiting for.

It’s a tech that needs an expert to present – a real RDS expert. I don’t think there is anyone in Europe (maybe anywhere outside of Microsoft) that knows RDmi as well as Freek Berson, MVP. I was quite happy when he submitted an RDmi session for Cloud Camp because I know his work. Freek works, writes, and presents on RDS and the best RDS people follow his work. He also knows RDS and RDmi inside-out.

 

Freek Berson
wortell, Remoting Windows Enthusiast

Freek Berson speaks at various conferences around the world including Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft TechSummit, Microsoft TechDays, BriForum, E2EVC and ExpertsLive. Freek is awarded Microsoft MVP since 2011. He co-athored the book “RDS – The Complete Guide” which is available on Amazon. He works as an Infrastructure Specialist at Wortell, a system integrator company based in the Netherlands, where he focusses on End User Computing and all related technologies mostly on the Microsoft platform. He is also a managing partner at rdsgurus.com. He maintains his personal blog at http://themicrosoftplatform.net where he writes articles and blog posts related to Remote Desktop Services, Azure, and other Microsoft technologies. He is also experienced in performing automated deployments using Azure Resource Manager and designing JSON templates. . You can follow him on twitter via @fberson.

 

I think that RDmi is going to be game changer for hosted services providers and ISVs. And Freek is the best person to talk about the subject – so if you want to figure out how to build a multi-tenant RDS environment in the cloud, join him for this session at Cloud Camp 2018.