We are running 3 Server 2008 RDS session hosts in a vmware environment. The VMs are running on 3 hosts, the hosts are Poweredge R720s, each with two 10 core 2.2GHz CPUs, and 132GB of RAM. The hosts are running ESXi 5.5U2 licensed under vsphere essentials plus. Storage is an Equalogic. Each VM is assigned 10vCPUs and 32GB of RAM. I also have set 512MB of video memory. There are roughly 20 users per RDS session host.
Our issue is that the video performance is very poor. We recently migrated users from a local desktop environment to a thin client / terminal server environment. Many of the users heavily utilize YouTube and flash based video for training. When playing a flash video through RDP the video and audio is extremely choppy, even when choosing the lowest quality of 360p.
I need to know what we can do to resolve this issue. We have another environment that consist of three 2012 R2 RDS servers that does not have the same issue. I believe this is because 2012 R2 has remote FX built in, but when I tried to add the role on the 2008 RDS servers, it does not allow it since Hyper V is required. Hyper V cannot be added since its already running on a hypervisor. If there are any settings we can change please advise. I have no problem purchasing GPUs for the hosts if it will help, anything to enhance the video performance but I am not sure if a GPU will help with flash video, especially in a virtual environment. Also, if migrating these users to a 2012 RDS environment will help, I will do this as well.
Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated.