RemoteFX is a technology first introduced in Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009 and launched on October 22, 2009. According to the Windows Server Team blog, the retail availability was September 14, 2009. It is built on Windows NT 6.1, the same core...

 SP1 that is designed to improve the visual experience of the Remote Desktop Protocol. RemoteFX is based on intellectual property

Intellectual property

Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...

 that Microsoft acquired and continued to develop since acquiring Calista Technologies

Calista Technologies

Calista Technologies was a company that provided virtual device solutions for Windows. The general premise behind the technology was to provide an abstract virtual view of a hosting machine's devices from within a virtual machine through drivers for Windows Vista and Windows XP and present the...

. It is a part of the overall Remote Desktop Services workload.

RemoteFX improvements include:

• the introduction of the RemoteFX codec, which is capable of preserving a high-fidelity experience for both video and text.
• the ability to present a virtualized instance of a physical GPU into multiple Windows 7 VMs. This provides virtual machines with access to the physical GPU, enabling hardware-accelerated rich graphics scenarios such as 3D rendering and game play.
• generalized support for redirection of USB devices into Windows 7 VMs, which allows peripheral devices to be used with guest operating systems.

The RemoteFX codec improvements are available to both Remote Desktop Session Hosts (RDSH) and Remote Desktop Virtualization Hosts (RDVH/VDI). the GPU virtualization, and USB redirection improvements are specific to Remote Desktop Virtualization Hosts.

Requirements

Implementation of the RemoteFX codec for RDSH does not require any special hardware, and leverages the CPU for encoding. The RemoteFX codec can be optionally hardware-accelerated by a GPU or ASIC for RDVH scenarios.

Implementation of the virtual GPU for VMs has the following requirements:

• Hyper-V
  Hyper-V
  Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian and formerly known as Windows Server Virtualization, is a hypervisor-based virtualization system for x86-64 systems. A beta version of Hyper-V was shipped with certain x86-64 editions of Windows Server 2008, and the finalized version was released on June 26,...
  
   must be installed on the server.
• The server's CPU must support Second Level Address Translation (SLAT).
• At least one DirectX
  DirectX
  Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...
  
  9.0c and 10.0 capable graphics card must be installed on the server.
• A RemoteFX encoder ASIC may also be optionally installed to further accelerate encoding.

Up to 12 virtual machines are supported per GPU.

Although any GPU meeting the above requirements will be capable of leveraging RemoteFX, The Windows Server Catalog carries an additional qualification to further define the requirements for server-qualified GPUs. These specifications define GPUs configuration requirements and provide VM performance targets.
Graphics cards that meet these are typically professional workstation products such as ATI/AMD's FirePro, v5800, v5900, v7800, v7900, v8800, v9800, and Radeon HD 6300; Nvidia's Quadro 2000, 4000, 5000, 6000, Quadro FX 2800M and 880M, QuadroPlex 70000 and Tesla M2070Q.

Servers will need to accommodate such graphics cards with either larger power supplies and more PCI-E slots or alternatively connect existing servers to an external PCIe expansion chasis such as the Dell PowerEdge C410x.