Successful Desktop Virtualization with Remote Desktop modern infrastructure (RDmi)

RDmi strategy

A powerful Remote Desktop modern infrastructure (RDmi) should be planned precisely (Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash)

The release of Remote Desktop modern infrastructure (RDmi), a further development of Remote Desktop Services, is expected in Q4 2018. In its development of RD modern infrastructure, Microsoft has concentrated on three main areas:

  • Increased security (thanks to Azure AD and isolated infrastructure roles such as RDmi Gateway or RDmi Connection Broker)
  • Improved cloud capability (among other things through high Azure scalability and RDmi Diagnostics)
  • Provision of Windows apps for each device (including through the HTML5 web client)

In its infographic, Microsoft gives suggestions on how a powerful, highly-scalable RDS deployment can be efficiently planned and implemented. For the perfect RDmi implementation in a company, it can be helpful to consider the following scenarios:

  • What’s better for your business? Lightweight, lower-cost session hosts or VDI for enhanced application compatibility? And do personal desktops or a desktop pool better meet the requirements of your IT environment?
  • How should Microsoft Remote Desktop be deployed? On-premises, in the cloud, or via a mix of both?
  • The scaling of the deployment also depends on user needs: Are simple applications used in the company, are large amounts of data processed with productivity applications or do users even work with high-performance engineering or graphics applications?
  • Access from anywhere must be guaranteed. Via RDmi Gateway, users can securely access internal network resources from outside the corporate network.
  • Easy to set up remote desktop infrastructure roles ensure high availability.
  • Everything that deals with security – from secure authentication via Azure Active Directory to secure data storage on-premises or in Azure.
  • And last but not least, the appropriate license model – billing per user, or per device, needs to be decided upon.

Besides the planning aspects of RDmi, the infographic clearly shows how to deploy and finetune the RD modern infrastructure. Management and monitoring are considerably easier, thanks to the RDmi Diagnostic role and the RDmi Powershell module for example. View this infographic »

But why is RDmi creating such a buzz among tech experts? Kristin L. Griffin and Benny Tritsch recently wrote an article for BrianMadden.com which goes into detail on how RDmi will work as well as the ideas and concepts behind it. They also go on to list a number of reasons as to why RDmi is something to really get excited about. A number of advantages will become available to businesses with the release of RDmi in late 2018. These include:

  • Being able to run RDS infrastructure on top of Azure Web Apps which many will find is far more cost effective than using virtual machines. While pricing information has yet to be released, Web App costs can be used the get a general idea.
  • The RD infrastructure layer and RD Session Host pools are fully separated, which results in enhanced security.
  • Azure Active Directory is used for authentication and authorization, as well as federation.
  • RDmi has been designed to support multiple tenants as well as Azure subscriptions on each RD infrastructure layer. This lowers the costs for hosting providers, especially for those with a number of small and medium-sized customers.
  • Different AD configurations are available for each RD Session Host pool.
  • RDmi leverages Web Apps’ auto-scaling possibilities and the general flexibility offered with Azure.
  • RDmi will deliver a new diagnostics service which will help to quickly troubleshoot problems with connections.

 

You can read the full article here. As can be seen from the above though, RDmi will offer a number of clear advantages for businesses, the public sector as well as service providers looking to move Windows desktops as well as WinForm applications to Azure.

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Tahani Khaled