NOTE With pooled VMs and session-based desktops, users can still personalize their
experiences considerably, although they still cannot install applications. Roaming user profiles and folder redirection are still available, but RDS adds support for user profile disks. With user profile disks enabled, RDS mounts a virtual hard disk containing the user’s settings and data to their user profile folder (C:\Users\Username). User profile disks persist between sessions. A great thing about user profile disks is that they are very simple to set up and manage.
RDS powers all three Microsoft VDI deployment methods, and they all have common benefits. They provide powerful administration features through the built-in management console (Figure 11-2). They offer a powerful and scalable virtualization platform, regardless of whether you are deploying session-based desktops, pooled VMs, or personal VMs. Lastly, they give users a consistently rich experience across LAN and WAN.
FIGURE 11-2 Remote Desktop Services Management Console.
Regardless of their common benefits, your choice depends on the following points, and Table 11-1 summarizes them for easy comparison: ■■
Personalization Do users need the ability to customize their desktops? If so, what level of customization do they need? With session-based desktops and pooled VMs, users have limited personalization capability with user profile disks (i.e., the ability to persist their data across different logins). However, they cannot keep their
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Windows 8 virtualization