Some Remote Desktop Session Host Guidelines

We’ve put about four years and two versions into our Small Business Solution (SBS). We have it running on-premises on standalone Hyper-V servers as well as on Hyper-V clusters (Clustered Storage Spaces and Hyper-V cluster we just deployed for a 15 seat accounting firm).

It is the foundation for the Cloud Office services we’ve been offering for the last year or so.

Since our Cloud Office solution runs in Remote Desktop Services we figured we’d share some pearls around delivering Remote Desktop Session Host based environments to clients:

• ~512MB/User is cutting it tight
• ~20 to 25 users in a 12GB to 16GB vRAM Hyper-V VM works okay with 2-3 vCPUs
• RDP via 8.1 RDP clients saturates a 1Mb DSL uplink at ~13-15 users depending on workload
• ALL browsers can bring the RDSHs to their knees
• Printing can be a bear to manage (Use Universal Print Drivers and Isolation where possible)
• Group Policy configuration and lockdown is mandatory
• Two partitions with User Profile Disks (UPDs), if used, on the second partition
• NOTE: UPDs + Office 2013 and earlier + Exchange 2013 and earlier = Broken Search!!!
• NOTE: RDSH Search Indexes for Outlook OSTs in UPDs can fill up the C: partition!
• Office 2016 and Exchange 2016 together are supposed to address the broken search situation in RDSH setups were UPDs are used. We have yet to begin testing the two together.

Our Cloud Office (SBS) is running on clusters we’ve designed based on Scale-Out File Server and Hyper-V.

Need a clustered solution for your SMB/SME clients? Drop us a line. They are _very_ affordable. ;)

Philip Elder
Microsoft High Availability MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book