HP Hardware Accelerated Graphics for Desktop Virtualization

Technical white paper | HP Hardware Accelerated Graphics for Desktop Virtualization

• Server 2012

– In Server 2012, the term RemoteFX definition has been expanded to include the following features: RemoteFX for

WAN, Adaptive Graphics, Media Remoting, Multi Touch, USB Redirection, Metro Style Remote Desktop App, Choice of

Software or Hardware GPU, RemoteFX supported on Sessions, VM’s, and Physical Machines

– Use the latest available driver for Windows Server 2012 from NVIDIA website

– Windows 2012 requires drivers for the NVIDIA cards installed on host, but does not support two types of video cards

running at the same time. Because of this the following modes must be used.

• Setup mode—for systems install, setup, and NVIDIA driver loading.

• User mode—for production RFX mode.

– In this mode it is not possible to reach iLO console through iLO, OA, or front I/O dongle. You must enable

remote RDP console for systems management

– GPU assignments are not dynamically managed after virtual machine startup for load balancing

– At this time this solution only has minimal support of OpenGL applications GPU is no longer required for RemoteFX as

the 3D components can be rendered in software, but having a GPU will significantly improve performance and offload

from CPU

– There are now two clients that can be used in Windows 8

• Classic RDP Client

• Integrated app publishing

Configure RemoteFX for best performance

• RemoteFX also supports two Group Policy settings that give administrators the flexibility to manually choose the best

configuration for their scenario

– Policies are under this path: “ComputerConfiguration\AdministrativeTemplates\WindowsComponents\Remote

Desktop Services\Remote Desktop Session Host\Remote Session Environment.”

• “Configure image quality for RemoteFX Adaptive Graphics.”

This policy setting specifies the visual quality for a remote session. Administrators can use this option to balance

network bandwidth usage with visual quality delivered. The options are Medium (default), High, and Lossless.

“Medium” quality consumes the lowest amount of bandwidth, “High” quality raises the image quality with a

moderate raise in bandwidth consumption, while “Lossless” uses lossless encoding, which preserves full color

integrity but requires significant increase in bandwidth

• “Configure RemoteFX Adaptive Graphics.”

This policy setting allows the administrator to choose the encoding configuration to be optimized for server

scalability or bandwidth usage. By default RemoteFX chooses the best configuration at runtime (RDP 8 Only), and

could dynamically switch between configurations based on network condition.

For more information, see this document: blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2012/08/06/remotefx-adaptive-

graphics-in-windows-server-2012-and-windows-8.aspx