Windows 2012 Remote Destop Service and RemoteApp Desing for Cloud Computing

Dear Engineers,

We are developing a new service for our business that allows our customers to have a full function office workplace hosted in the cloud. On their desks there will be just a dumb thin client which connects to their desktop hosted on a Windows 2012 Remote desktop services infrastructure.

For some time we have done some research, testing and build a proof of concept and we have we got a good understanding of what kind of services we want to offer and on witch technology is needed for implementing this service on.

We reach out to you because we don’t have enough know-how and specialists with experience for the technology we want to use for this solution. With this request on vWorker we hopefully find someone who can devise a technical solution and can support us during the technical implementation of this new service based on good skills and best pratices.

We will discuss the final solution in a later stage because we don’t want to set requirements so hard that we possibly rule out some of the good ideas you might have yourself. Here is a first trough at the functional and technical requirements.

Functional Requirements.

We want to offer our customers a thin client (zero management/maintenance) in the office workplace that allows them to login into their domain and get a fully working desktop that contains the standard applications and, if authorised, the business application that uses is entitled to use. On this client they have their own profile/desktop, home folder and can access shared resources like a network share. Also they have their email client on this desktop and can browse safely on the internet. Printers that are in the office can be used as well.

When working from home or remotely using their own device it should be possible to connect/login again to this system via the remote desktop web service.

Deliverables

What we first need is a solution architecture, a blueprint including al the building blocks and components to set this up. How many servers do we need, what are the specs (mem/cpu/disk) and what role do have in the total solution.

A design that meets our requirements to start off this new service but is scalable for future grow. Maybe we start with 2 customers that are going to use this new service with 8 and 12 clients but in the future it should take minor effort to add the 3th and 4th.

Besides this a few points need to be addressed in this design.

Design Stage

1) Scalable.

Since we staring small and want to get more customers in the future we need to have this environment scalable. We have good experience with Hyper-V virtualisation that makes it possible to add another physical server and add it to the total capacity on the virtual environment

Design choices that have to be made is to have dedicated hardware per customer, and create their virtual network only on that machine(s) or create a virtual network per customer that on top of the physical infra so these are customer independent

2) Availability

Of course we need high availability in the solution. Our datacentre partner garantees 99.8% uptime on the physical level and we need this on the most critical (probably shared components) as well. Again we see a lot of benefits in using the physical layer as independent as possible to the virtual layer because it’s easy to move virtual nodes around when hardware fails or performance is getting low. If there are single point of failure in the solution a server that is responsible for access of all clients.

Ow... out of karakters.. See the attached Word doc..

So thank you in advance for your attention and hope there is someone that can help us out with finding the best setup for our business and make a design we can use for implementation.

I only get back on substantively responds to my request.

Kind regards,

Geordy

SteetWise Solutions.

3) Security

One of the most important points to consider in this design is the security This is related to the connection between the users and the desktop in the cloud as well the security policy users get on the remote desktop. For example rebooting the server should not be allowed, the same for access to the server manager tools.

Also it should not be possible that customer 1 and customer 2 can access/see each other’s systems. Both need to be in separated virtual LAN that is managed on the hyper-V infrastructure.


4) Windows 2012 Technology – Roles and features that are used

This cloud desktop service technology is based on the latest features that comes with Windows server 2012. We want to benefit as much as possible of all the new roles and features that are used in the solution. Think of active directory, hyper-v and remote desktop services but maybe there are a couple of other features that we can use to make it better, secure and easy to manage like high availability, backup and firewall management.


5) Manageability

As told earlier, we intent to scale up as more customers are going to use our cloud desktop services. It could also happen that customers decide to leave us or scale up down themselves. So they start with 8 cloud desktops and grow to 20 in time. We need a smart way to add and remove new customers and we are still a little bit in the dark about this. Do we deploy a dedicated Active directory for each customer witch is sysprept in some way and deploy from template? Do we have one server that has a complete set of all the needed roles and features (one virtual server containing the AD, Remote Desktop Services and all that is needed to host this solution) and add extra terminal servers based on the need an size of the customer. Or do we setup a centralized managed environment with one Active Directory containing all the different customers witch make managing AD policy management easier.
I think and hope Windows 2012 provide a good solution or best practice for this but I am counting on you to know the pro’s and de con’s and suggest the best scenario.

Also our customers come with new software or updates on existing programs, there a couple of ways to do this and we have seen some examples how this could be done using remote desktop services technology in 2012.
Implementation Stage.

Although this is out of scope for this job we want to have someone available during the implementation stage., the fun part of this project. Al the systems are remotely accessible so it is possible to give you access to the systems. We intent to do most of the installation and configuration ourselves for leaning purpose but when we get stuck we need a specialist to rescue us out of the woods. So a couple of hours for this support would be highly desirable.
If there is someone who will take on the complete implementation we can discuss this as well.

Skill set engineer

So we need an all-round Microsoft Windows engineer that has some hands on experience in designing and building cloud solutions based on the new Windows 2012 server technology.
Microsoft Windows 2012 Server:

- Active directory – Roles and groups
- Remote desktop services and Remote App
- Hyper-V virtualisation
- Network design and planning
- Architecture designing (LIV/PIV)

Pilvitietotekniikka Microsoft Tietojärjestelmäarkkitehtuuri Windows Server

Projektin tunnus: #4800538

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