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I would like to have Remote Desktop users benefit from the new RDP 8 features, including Aero designs and H.264 on-the-fly video encoding. While I could find a ton of documentation on how to set this up on bare metal hardware for VDI scenarios, my environments typically are Remote Desktop Session Host servers running as guests in Hyper-V installs. So here go the questions:

  1. Is there a way for virtualized RDSH installs to take advantage of the GPUs for Aero rendering and video encoding? As I understand, it is possible to expose a virtual GPU through Hyper-V, but the docs list additional requirements as SLAT, which I see would be unavailable from within the VM.
  2. If this is possible, would I need to run the full-graphical install of Windows Server instead of the "Hyper-V Server" edition as the hypervisor?
  3. Is using GPUs in this scenario worth the effort or would I rather benefit from a couple additional CPU cores used for soft-rendering?
the-wabbit
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  • It's a little unclear if you are virtualizing the RDP servers themselves? How different is your environment from this one: http://blog.itvce.com/?p=1569 – Jim B May 29 '13 at 13:53
  • @JimB `"While I could find a ton of documentation on how to set this up on bare metal hardware for VDI scenarios, my environments typically are Remote Desktop Session Host servers running as guests in Hyper-V installs."` is pretty clear that he's virtualizing the severs in question. – MDMarra May 29 '13 at 14:12
  • broker is virtualized? Gateway is virtulized? There is only a mention of the session hosts. It's fairly rare to virtualize session hosts due to the extra overhead. – Jim B May 29 '13 at 15:15
  • @JimB No, the session hosts indeed. These are low-load installs for small groups of users (5-30) primarily for one or more of these four reasons: administrative separation, creation of a security boundary, application compatibility, licensing constraints / requirements. The virtualization overhead in these scenarios is justifiable - the disadvantages of having to buy machines which would always be notoriously under-utilized, draw power and produce heat would predominate in a physical install. – the-wabbit May 29 '13 at 17:52

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No such solution exists. Remote Desktop Virtualization in Hyper-V addresses the scenario where you have a client OS running in a VM and you want that guest to be able to use the GPU resources (even without actually assigning a GPU to the VM) to render a high-fidelity client experience.

There is no mechanism in Hyper-V to assign a GPU to a VM.

Jake Oshins
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