Like in every new release of Terminal Services (I will keep use that name for now...) Microsoft adds features that third parties have been developing for some time now. This time around it is no different but that does not make the new features any less worth looking forward to. Microsoft is smart enough to leave enough space open for their partners to innovate. This is a classical (good) move by Microsoft. Remember when TS 2008 came around for the first time? Everybody was very excited and mentioned that you could do without third party products and just use TS 2008. Well today we know you can't. That's because Microsoft aims it at the "low-complexity" market. This actually means smaller customers / markets that have not thought about Terminal Services before. With Terminal Services in 2008 R2 Microsoft is taking the same approach, only now VDI is the focus. They have addressed some of the critical aspects of a VDI environment like the "user experience" and having an actual connection broker to start with. So in R2 VDI with just Microsoft product will be an option for "low-complexity" environments, so for smaller customers / markets that have not thought about VDI before. They even say it literally: "Together with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, the Remote Desktop Connection Broker enables a VDI solution for low-complexity, departmental environments, and a platform for partners who are delivering rich, extensible solutions where heterogeneous client support is a prerequisite, and when enhanced management and scalability is a requirement." Since Windows Server 2008 R2 is only going to be avaialble in 2010, this is completely inline with Microsoft's position on VDI in that they really do (did?) not think too much of it today.

One of the big contributors to new features in Windows Server 2008 R2 Terminal Services is (finally) the integration of Calista. This technology drives most of the "user experience improvements". To be honest, I expected a bit more from the Calista integration. But perhaps later versions or later builds will change this. Anyway, without further delay, here are some of the major new features as far as I am concerned:

Session Broker support for VDI: the Session Broker introduced in Windows Server 2008 will now also support the brokering of (Windows) VDI machines. The two key deployment scenarios supported by the Remote Desktop Connection Broker are persistent (permanent) VMs and pooled VMs. In the case of a persistent VM, there is a one-to-one mapping of VMs to users; each user is assigned a dedicated VM which can be personalized and customized, and which preserves any changes made by the user. Today, most early adopters of VDI deploy persistent VMs as they provide the greatest flexibility to the end user. In the case of a pooled VM, a single image is replicated as needed for users; user state can be stored via profiles and folder redirection, but will not persist on the VM once the user logs off. In either case, the in-box solution supports storage of the image(s) on the Hyper-V host.

Multimedia Redirection – Calista baby! Provides high quality multimedia by redirecting multimedia files and  streams so that audio and video content is sent in its original format from the server to the client and rendered using the clients local media playback capabilities.

True multiple monitor support – This is very impressive. I have seen prototypes and it is unique for a remote display protocol as far as I know. Quest does 4 at the moment for RDP and that is unique as far as I know for the current RDP protocol.  Anyway, this feature enables support for up to 10 monitors in almost  size, resolution or layout with RemoteApp and Remote desktop; applications will behave just like they do when running locally.

Audio Input & Recording -  "Audio in" for RDP. Supports any microphone connected to users local machine, enables audio recording support for RemoteApp and Remote Desktop, great for VoIP scenarios & enables speech recognition for Remote Desktop Services.

Aero Glass support - Finally. I am sure by that time (2010) every one will have the hardware to run glass :-). This provides users with the ability to use AeroGlass for  Remote Desktop Server; ensuring that remote desktop sessions look and feel like local desktop sessions

Direct X redirection – For DirectX 9, 10 & 11 applications will render on the server and will be remoted using bitmaps (required direct3D hardware).  If the application supports the new DirectX 10.1 API with remoting extensions the DirectX (2D& 3D)graphics are redirected to the local client to harness the power of the GPU on the users local device, removing the need for a GPU on the serve. So unless your application is made to use DirectX 10.1  (extremely new) it's not really a killer feature...

TS Web Access Customization – Beauty is in the eye of the webmaster! It is now possible to easily extend the look and feel of web access by both customers and partners using support for cascading style sheets.  It is possible to host the the webpart sharepoint .. It is also possible to create custom websites that consume the  RemoteApp & Desktop Connection  XML feed and transform these with XSLT.

Session broker extensibility -  If the new SB will be embrased by third party vendors (and it probably will) it will give Hyper-V more juice as a platform for more "on demand" ", cloud" (did I just say cloud?) implementations of VDI. This is becuase the session broker offers broad extensibility to enable customers and ISVs to take advantage of the built in RDP redirection features whilst providing significant additional unique value through the various types of plug-ins; for example:
      - Policy (policy plug-in) – determining proper farm or VM for a connection
      - Load Balancing (filter plug-in) – Choosing the proper endpoint based on load
      - Orchestration (filter plug-in) – Preparing a VM to Accept RDP connections
      - Placement (resource plug-in) – Locating the proper VM and placing it on the proper VM Host

RDS Powershell Provider – Powershell all the way! Easily manage multiple sever and repetitive tasks - almost all Remote Desktop Services administrative tasks can now be scripted; view and edit configuration settings for RD Gateway, Remote Desktop Server and more.

New Kernel Scheduling for RDS scenarios – Still very basic but at least something usable is going to be done. Still not really configurable I suspect. Stop runaway applications from affecting all users on a server – the new kernel scheduling mechanism for RDS fairly distributes CPU cycles across sessions. It dynamically scales the distribution based on number of active sessions and their loading.

IP Address Virtualization - This has been around in the Virtual Access Suite or Citrix for ages. You need it to have some "legacy" application to work that require a unique IP address per TS session instead of the TS address. In TS R2 this features will enable per-session or per application IP virtualization to meet regulatory and compliance needs & fix applications that break when it shares an IP address with other applications.

Other Session Broker improvements: (clustering support, wizard driven, no shared disk – share based quorum config, powershell installation)

A lot of the information in this article comes the Windows Server 2008 R2 reviewers guide. Recommended reading as far as I am concerned.