RemoteFX Hardware Requirements…

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I wanted to build a box to dance a little with RemoteFX. Turns out, the spare I have is running an older CPU that doesn’t have SLAT support which means ‘no bueno’. (In my case an Intel 6600 Quad Core)

Here’s more detail on what you need to run RemoteFX from a hardware perspective:

RemoteFX for RD Virtualization Host server hardware requirements

There are several hardware requirements that must be met when deploying a RemoteFX server:

  • SLAT-enabled processor – The processor in the RemoteFX server must support Second-Level Address Translation (SLAT). In virtualization scenarios, hardware-based SLAT support improves performance. On Intel processors, this is called Extended Page Tables (EPT), and on AMD processors, it is called Nested Page Tables (NPT).
  • GPU - At least one graphics processing unit (GPU) is required on the RemoteFX server. The GPU driver must support DirectX 9.0c and DirectX 10.0. If more than one GPU is installed in the RemoteFX server, the GPUs must be identical. The GPU must have sufficient dedicated video memory that is separate from system memory.

Also worth nothing:

For a list of GPUs that will work with RemoteFX in Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1, see this blog post (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=197416). The list of GPUs will grow and evolve for the final release of Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1. For a list of recommended GPU drivers, see this blog post (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=197417).

And a final important point:

In order to use Live Migration, the source and destination RemoteFX servers must have the same GPU installed in the server.

All this can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817602(WS.10).aspx