Microsoft RemoteFX–USB Redirection

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Dave Kawula

Ok so the first round of testing went well with RemoteFX.  Now let’s check out some of the other cool features like USB Redirection.  I have actually had some of my customers over the past few years go to XenDesktop 3 and 4x + because of the lack of USB Redirection support in native RDP.

First of all off to the Microsoft Performance Escalation Team for some help.  I have work on numerous projects with these guys in years gone by and I find they are always are great source of information.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2010/06/10/introducing-microsoft-remotefx-usb-redirection-part-1.aspx

So I followed the article and enabled RemoteFX USB Support via the Group Policy Object and rebooted my system.

Let’s see what this looks like shall we….

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Now I opened my RDC and checked the settings for local resources

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My RemoteFX options are missing – Wonder why – Then I realized I didn’t have RemoteFX type of device plugged in.  I just had a couple of USB External Hard Drives plugged in.

So I grabbed an extra USB Camera and a connection for my USB Printer.

This looks a bit better now…

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I will update more on my RemoteFX Experience as a build up my LAB at home.  So far the performance has been really good for LAN based connections.  I am working on my next posting which should have some more Performance metrics for everyone.

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Exchange 2010 SP2–Deployment 1st time

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Dave Kawula

Well I normally forget to document when I do things for a first time but my new years resolution is to make sure I do it more diligently in 2012.

Tonight I will be upgrading a production Exchange 2010 SP1 farm to Exchange 2010 SP2.  I haven’t really even looked into the pre-req’s for it yet so I think that would be a good starting point.

By the way – This is another Production Hyper-V Server running Exchange 2010 as a core Workload.  Smile

Looks like another massive service pack – about 1.38 GB in size once extracted.  Make sure you leave enough space on your drive to get this done.

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So the first thing I would like to do is check out the release notes in the planning section of the installer – Let’s see what’s new in Service Pack 2.

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So the newest features of note are as follows courtesy of Technet:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh529924.aspx

Hybrid Configuration Wizard

Exchange 2010 SP2 introduces the Hybrid Configuration Wizard which provides you with a streamlined process to configure a hybrid deployment between on-premises and Office 365 Exchange organizations. Hybrid deployments provide the seamless look and feel of a single Exchange organization and offer administrators the ability to extend the feature-rich experience and administrative control of an on-premises organization to the cloud. For more information, see Understanding the Hybrid Configuration Wizard.

  Address Book Policies

Exchange 2010 SP2 introduces the address book policy object which can be assigned to a mailbox user. The ABP determines the global address list (GAL), offline address book (OAB), room list, and address lists that are visible to the mailbox user that is assigned the policy. Address book policies provide a simpler mechanism to accomplish GAL separation for the on-premises organization that needs to run disparate GALs. For more information, see Understanding Address Book Policies.

  Cross-Site Silent Redirection for Outlook Web App

With Exchange 2010 SP2, you can enable a silent redirection when a Client Access server receives a client request that is better serviced by a Client Access server located in another Active Directory site. This silent redirection can also provide a single sign-on experience when forms-based authentication is enabled on each Client Access server. For more information, see Understanding Proxying and Redirection.

  Mini Version of Outlook Web App

The mini version of Outlook Web App is a lightweight browser-based client, similar to the Outlook Mobile Access client in Exchange 2003. It’s designed to be used on a mobile operating system. The mini version of Outlook Web App provides users with the following basic functionality:

  • Access to e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks and the global address list.
  • Access to e-mail subfolders.
  • Compose, reply to, and forward e-mail messages.
  • Create and edit calendar, contact, and task items.
  • Handle meeting requests.
  • Set the time zone and automatic reply messages.

For more information, see Understanding the Mini Version of Outlook Web App.

  Mailbox Replication Service

In Exchange 2010 SP1, if you wanted to move mailboxes from on-premises to Outlook.com or to another forest, you had to enable MRSProxy on the remote Client Access server. To do this, you had to manually configure the web.config file on every Client Access server. In Exchange 2010 SP2, two parameters have been added to the New-WebServicesVirtualDirectory and Set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory cmdlets so that you don’t have to perform the manual configuration: MRSProxyEnabled and MaxMRSProxyConnections. For more information, see Start the MRSProxy Service on a Remote Client Access Server.

  Mailbox Auto-Mapping

In Exchange 2010 SP1, Office Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 clients can automatically map to any mailbox to which a user has Full Access permissions. If a user is granted Full Access permissions to another user’s mailbox or to a shared mailbox, Outlook, through Autodiscover, automatically loads all mailboxes to which the user has full access. However, if the user has full access to a large number of mailboxes, performance issues may occur when starting Outlook. Therefore, in Exchange 2010 SP2, administrators can turn off the auto-mapping feature by setting the value of the new Automapping parameter to $false on the Add-MailboxPermission cmdlets. For more information, see Disable Outlook Auto-Mapping with Full Access Mailboxes.

  Multi-Valued Custom Attributes

Exchange 2010 SP2 introduces five new multi-value custom attributes that you can use to store additional information for mail recipient objects. The ExtensionCustomAttribute1 to ExtensionCustomAttribute5 parameters can each hold up to 1,300 values. You can specify multiple values as a comma-delimited list.The following cmdlets support these new parameters:

  • Set-DistributionGroup
  • Set-DynamicDistributionGroup
  • Set-Mailbox
  • Set-MailContact
  • Set-MailPublicFolder
  • Set-RemoteMailbox

  Litigation Hold

In Exchange 2010 SP2, you can’t disable or remove a mailbox that has been placed on litigation hold. To bypass this restriction, you must either remove litigation hold from the mailbox, or use the new IgnoreLegalHold switch parameter when removing or disabling the mailbox. The IgnoreLegalHold parameter has been added to the following cmdlets:

  • Disable-Mailbox
  • Remove-Mailbox
  • Disable-RemoteMailbox
  • Remove-RemoteMailbox
  • Disable-MailUser
  • Remove-MailUser

 

Ok on with the install.  Nice Welcome screen.

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Like a typical Exchange install some pre-reqs are always missing.  This time it was IIS 6 WMI Compatibility. 

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No problem I am installing and the we will try the Upgrade to SP2 again.  That was the only Pre-Req that failed on me.

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Yup I checked it was missing….

Now we will retry the SP2 Upgrade again.  Overall I have been at this for about 45 minutes.

Here goes the upgrade…..

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Had an issue with my Hyper-V Virtual Machine that was pre-configured and the installation failed at about 45 minutes.  As it turns out we had a clock skew and it was making  the System Attendant service fail.  As such the SP2 Upgrade failed.  This was an environmental issue but I have to say this occurs more often than you would think.

MAKE SURE YOU CHECK YOUR CLOCKS!!!!  Time was skewed and it bombed the installation.

It is a major issue with Virtualized Exchange Servers and you should add this to your health checks – Don’t let the integrated services or VM Tools manage time synchronization on an Exchange Server. 

One nice this was when I resumed my Service Pack 2 Upgrade – It knew where to resume from:

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After this the installation completed nicely.

 

I can now update that 2 weeks post installation no issues with the customer.

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Microsoft Remote FX–Deployment in my Home Lab

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Dave Kawula

I have been waiting a long time to test out the performance of Microsoft’s Remote FX.  It was just a bit out of my price range for a home lab until this point.  It still is hard to figure out what kind of video card is actually supported for Remote FX.

Also it is a bit confusing because once the Remote FX Video Adapter is added to a VM – You will loose console access to the VM via the Hyper-V Management Console and will only be able to connect via RDP.  This is unless you load the RemoteFX CAP driver which is discussed in more detail in this link:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817602(WS.10).aspx.

Here is what you will see when you attempt to use the native Hyper-V Management Console to access your RemoteFX Guest.

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Anyways enough with the fluffy stuff – Let’s get into the actual performance of the Guest vs. Native performance on the Host itself.

I have a Windows 7 x64 Enterprise SP1 Guest and my Host is a Windows 2008 R2 Sp1 Enterprise Server with Hyper-V Installed.

Here is my Remote FX Adapter Configuration:

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Here is how I tested – I downloaded 3DMark Vantage Build 1.01 from: http://www.futuremark.com/download/

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I just used the free version for this test.  I wanted to compare native performance of the Radeon 6950 on the Host System to the RemoteFX Enabled Guest.

While I was downloading and waiting for the installer I decided to checkout some of the new Performance Counters available on my Hyper-V Host Server.

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Here are the counters in Histogram view in Performance Monitor.  I will show the before and after – I was still waiting on my download so I just went to youtube and started an HD Video.

Let’s checkout the Display Settings with it enabled.

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Here is the video I was running in 720p —

Here is the before and after snip on the Host Server’s Parent Partion:

Before the video running                      After while running the video

image                      image

 

Doesn’t even look like we were touching the GPU much here…. hmmm

 

Performance Monitor on the Windows 7 Guest – Notice the new Performance counters here:

Before the video running                      After while running the video

image                 image

 

Even from the client doesn’t even look like the Radeon 6950 is even being hit at all.  But the video quality is amazing in the Windows 7 Guest.

Ok – time for some reach benchmarks.  I will now install 3DMarkVantage.

First let’s see the performance on the parent partition – 2008 R2 SP1 Host Server.

I just used the default tests from the main landing page in the testing tool.

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It took about 10 minutes for the tests to execute – Remember I didn’t tweak my system at all and I ran this with an almost maxed out Host Parent Partition.  I didn’t turn off any of the other workloads running.

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For all the detailed results click on this link:  http://3dmark.com/3dmv/3805465

 

Now let’s do the same test inside of the RemoteFX Windows 7 Guest.

Once again we simply used the defaults for the tests.  But wait….

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That doesn’t look good – Direct X 10 isn’t supported with RemoteFX?  Really.

Maybe it is just the tool…

Let’s try another one: http://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm

 

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Ok – So we are now installed – Checking out the spec’s of my RemoteFX Enabled Guest…

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Houston we have a problem!!!

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So I downloaded and installed the latest version of the AMD / ATI Drivers

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Once I did that it actually broke RemoteFX.  When you attempt to load RemoteFX on a Host without the correct video adapter it will throw an error message stating that you don’t have sufficient resources to launch the virtual machine.

As a result in order to get it working again I had to uninstall and then re-install RemoteFX.

Once I did this and added it back into the Windows 7 Guest.  The adapter changed to a Microsoft Remote FX Graphics Device from the RDPUDD Chained Adapter.

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Let’s re-run the tests and see what happens.

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Well DirectX 10 tests are still failing….

But when I looked more closely I noticed that the Frames per second on Graphics 3D – Simple are way up from – 3.69 to around just south of 500.

That is a pretty dramatic increase – I think I will try watching that video again from above and see how much better it looks with the right driver stack loaded.

At 720p there was almost no noticeable lag in the video – I think you could actually watch the full video in here. 

I am going to now remove the RemoteFX WDDM Driver and see what the test results look like.

First lets open the Performance Test 7.0 tool again.

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Notice the Video Adapter information missing.  Let’s see what the default really is without RemoteFX enable. 

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Ok and now for the moment of truth – Survey says……

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I couldn’t even get the testing tool to run properly without the RemoteFX Adapter loaded.  As a result the actual comparison benchmarks are not possible at this time.

For the next Blog posting on this topic I will perform similar tests using Citrix HDX with XenDesktop running on top of this Hyper-V VDI Configuration.  As it stands right now this solution would provide the functionality required for most environments. 

Once now that we have some initial benchmarks – I am curious to see the results and just how much Citrix adds-on to this Hyper-V RemoteFX Solution.

 

Additional References are listed below:

Virtualization Guy did a nice little video up on RemoteFX installation and configuration:

RemoteFX Installation and Performance Testing

 

Good Article from Brian Madden on RemoteFX vs. Citrix HDX 3D:

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2010/10/28/citrix-hdx-3d-vs-microsoft-remotefx.aspx

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Nit and Grit Labs–My Showcase of Technology

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Dave Kawula

Well I have finally had a few minutes last night to start rebuilding my lab environment.

I wanted to showcase many of the technologies that I have been working with over the past few years.  My Lab rebuild includes the following technologies thus far:

Windows 2008 R2 SP1

Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Active Directory Native Mode

Exchange 2010 SP1 Rollup 5

SQL 2008 R2

SCCM 2007 R3  — Soon to be migrated to CM 2012

1E Nightwatchman – 6.0.500.152

1E Wakeup Server – 6.0.500.118

1E Web Wakeup – 1.8.0.97

1E Enterprise View – 2.0.100.81

1E AppClarity

1E Shopping – 4.0.0.1702

1E Nomad Branch– 4.0.100.436

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

Microsoft Server 2008 R2 SP1 VDI – With RemoteFX

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Along with part of this upgrade I have also upgraded my LAB System with a nice modification: 

I have added a single ATI Radeon HD 6950 – 1 GB Video Card.  I required this because I was unable to test Remote FX with my onboard adapter.  So far I am able to watch full HD quality Videos via my Windows 7 VDI guest.  I will test with a full Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 deployment integrated with SCVMM and Hyper-V in the coming months.

Check out a couple pictures of this beast – BTW – I picked it up for $230.00 CDN.

IMG00922-20120110-1509  IMG00926-20120110-1513

IMG00925-20120110-1512

 

My next upgrade was to get off my old SATA Drives and upgrade to a couple of Corsair 120GB SSD Drives for my VHD Storage and Host Partition. 

IMG00924-20120110-1510

This upgrade provides me with amazing performance and I was able to build the following LAB configuring using Hyper-V Differencing Disks in less than 4 Hours inclusive of installing the Base OS, Differencing Disks, Sysprepping the master VHD, Installing AD, Exchange, SQL, CM 2007 R3, etc. 

I have always been a fan of Monster Servers for lab environments to mimic production scenarios.  After going through this upgrade I am a changed man!!!  I have better performance off these little SSD Drives than off my old EVA 4400 or my Dell Equallogic PS 5000 and 6000’s.

The total upgrade cost me less than 700.00 CDN for my home lab and I think this is a must for anyone that is serious about upgrading their certifications and just learning about products.

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Performance Tuning your Hyper-V Farm – Configuring Host Reserves

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Dave Kawula

When recently testing performance of Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1 Dynamic Memory I encountered an interesting issue. The performance of my Parent Partition (Host OS) was terrible. Basically all of my guest workloads consumed all available memory on the system. As a result the console of the Parent Partition was unstable and nearly un-useable. This wasn’t really an issue with Hyper-V Prior to Windows 2008 R2 SP1 because we had to fix the amount of memory per guest workload.

Don’t get me wrong I love the Dynamic Memory feature but it does require a bit of customization to prevent this issue from occurring. There is a registry key that can be added to permanently reserve the amount of memory available to the parent partition. This will ensure that your parent partition is stable and you get a consistent experience across your Hyper-V farm.

To make this change simple do the following:

1. Open the registry of your Hyper-V Host Server
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Virtualization
3. Create a new REG_DWORD with a value of MemoryReserve
4. The setting is the amount of Memory you want to reserve for your Hyper-V Host — I recommend at least 2GB (2000 MB)

This simple change will allow you to ensure that you have enough resources and fully implement all of the functionality of Dynamic Memory in Service Pack 1. Remember the reserve isn’t really a big deal because most Hosts today have at least 128GB to 256 GB of Memory.

The screen shot below is an example of this configuration:

I would recommend making this part of your standard build Group Policy Object for your Hyper-V Host Servers. All you would have to do is move the object in Active Directory to the correct OU and all of your settings would come down nicely.

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Demystifying the Microsoft Virtualization Stack – Screen Cast Series Part 4

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Dave Kawula

This is part 4 in my Screencast Series on Demystifying the Microsoft Virtualization Stack.

I have to mention a very special thanks to Rick Claus from Microsoft Canada. He did all the editing on the videos and really made these look good. Rick, beers are on me in Toronto my friend.

In this episode you will learn about:
Virtual Network configurations, demonstrate live migration, troubleshoot VM Configuration errors, Adding Hyper-V Clusters into SCVMM, Live P2V from ESX to Hyper-V using SCVM.

Please enjoy

Dave

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Demystifying the Microsoft Virtualization Stack – Screen Cast Series Part 3

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Dave Kawula

Here is the third video in my Sreencast series. In this video we will continue to focus on our two node cluster build, Reccommendations for NIC Naming Conventions, IP Addressing and Cluster Network Metrics, Binding Orders, Disabling IPV6 (If required), Disabling Firewall (If required), Configuring Remote Management, Using Powershell to add Roles.

I truly hope you enjoy this post.

Thanks,

Dave

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Demystifying the Microsoft Virtualization Stack – Screen Cast Series Part 2

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Dave Kawula

Here is the 2nd part of my Screencast series — I am really excited to get this published.

I included some great stuff in here about architecture, projects and configurations to maximize Hyper-V performance – this episode talks about Node configuration

Enjoy

Dave

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Demystifying the Microsoft Virtualization Stack – Screen Cast Series Part 1

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Dave Kawula

Hello Hyper-V and System Center faithful. One of the jobs I took on over the summer was to do a screencast series on the Microsoft Virtualization Stack and how it compares to VMware.  I am now done 4 parts of my Screen Cast Series.

In the first Video you will get a great overview on how to start your Hyper-V Virtualization Project Properly.

Check out my video below…

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TechDays 2011 – Here we come (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver)

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Dave Kawula

Once again this year I have the privilege of being selected as a guest speaker.  This year will be my busiest ever as I am leading 3 of 8 Sessions in the Virtualization track. 

These sessions are all based on my real world experience of deploying Hyper-V Private Clouds for customers all over North America.  It is an great chance for me to give back and show how we are doing it in the field.

Thanks,

Dave

VIR341
Hyper-V in the Real World –Multi-Site DR with the System Center Suite of Products

Are you struggling with new expectations of high availability for your workloads? Have you been told by upper management that Exchange, SQL Server, Web Services are critical applications and need to have a 4 hour or less Service Level Agreement. Is it possible to achieve a Multi-Site DR solution with Microsoft System Center and Hyper-V?

Yes it is! With Microsoft System Center Technologies you can accomplish this economically. Microsoft Enterprise Core Infrastructure Licensing + Microsoft System Management Suite (SMSE/D) licensing include all of the tools necessary to complete this out of box.
VIR340
Hyper-V in the Real World – Performance Tuning and Best Practices

Do you have Hyper-V deployed? Are you looking to deploy in the next few months? In this session you will learn from our Real World Deployments. Review best practices on the following:

  • Virtual Switch Configuration
  • High Availability
  • VLAN Trunking
  • Performance Monitoring
  • Disk Configuration
  • Hyper-V Optimizations
  • Performance Baselines
  • Dynamic Memory
  • and more!

If you are serious about getting it right the first time this session is one that should not be missed.

VIR317
Understanding How Microsoft Virtualization Compares to VMware

This is a must-see session for anyone who is comparing VMware with Microsoft’s virtualization offerings. We will review Microsoft’s technology compared to VMware, focusing on what differentiates the two technologies. The session will also cover effective strategies for integrating Microsoft virtualization into datacenter environments, and review one company’s experience with implementing Microsoft virtualization. If you need to know how the Microsoft virtualization stack compares to VMware’s, this is the session for you!

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