Yesterday I was really excited when I got the RC release of Service Pack 1 of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to test the new feature they added which will be a promising technology called RemoteFX. This new technology will impact those users who always or frequently uses Remote Desktop to access their system. One of my(and others for sure) current problem with Remote Desktop is the way it communicates with the system being remotely accessed. I won’t explain technically how it works but the thing is with todays technology applications tends to be more and more complex in a way on how it presents its user interface (UI). Example of this is applications built with Windows Presentation Foundation or WPF. Since most of the UI layers built are Double Buffered, when you view the application inside Remote Desktop it shows significant performance degradation because the way it renders comparing the same application when you run it physically on the system it was installed. RemoteFX will eliminate that issue and improved UI responsiveness. In fact, you can play those high graphics games now via Remote Desktop.
The Bad news is… You can’t do RemoteFX on VMware and VirtualBox- FOR SURE!. Answer: RemoteFX needs Windows Virtualization technology called Hyper-V as as its pre-requisite in order for you to install and use it. Since you’re Windows 7/Windows 2008 R2 was running already as “Virtualized” on top of your existing Host Operating System. Hypervisor could not be passed from to the Host OS to the Guest OS. Put simply, you can’t virtualized another system if you are on top of already virtualized OS.
Well, I know some of people think it was stupid to use RemoteFX in already had “remote desktop” virtual software. But all I can say is how Virtualbox sucks on graphics which is poorer than VMware(I know Virtualbox is faster in terms of CPU,Memory Access and IO Operations but can it run Aero desktop support?I don’t think so). VMware can support Aero graphics but really not as good as it is. Yeah I know VMware uses same protocol as RDP and Virtualbox uses VNC protocol for theirs but don’t you think its time for them to step forward and do something “seriously” about Graphics Virtualization. Not until Intel and AMD release their CPU support for it. By the way, RemoteFX utilizes GPU power for rendering and not CPU as opposed to the current Remote Desktop. I forgot how great VMware and Virtualbox graphics adapter!
My point is, people who has capable of running multiple virtualized desktop OS for different purposes like for “Testing” could not use this upcoming technology. I can blame both Microsoft and those Virtualization companies for my failure. Why Microsoft depends Hypre-V for the RemoteFX (I know there was technical reasons for it) and why virtualization companies couldn’t improve graphics. We were almost a year or so before using 22 nanometer silicon technology why software was still in a hundreds until now?
