Windows 7, RDP 7.0, Thin clients, and my thoughts

Looking to go green and cut costs?  Me too!

I've been watching Microsoft closely for over a year waiting for them to jump into the VDI market.  First we saw Hyper-V, then I got wind of RDP 7.0 (HURRAY, something to compete with Citrix ICA, and Citrix ICA+SpeedScreen), now I'm seeing more connection broker development with 2008 R2.  So now here is the big question...

If and when are we going to see this mythical RDP 7.0 client running on a sipping power, 7+ year SDL, low cost, little to no maintenance, thin client. 

Personally, I’ve completed RDP testing across saturated T1’s, empty T1’s, cable ISP/VPN, cable ISP/NAT, local gigabit network during average saturation, and local gigabit in a high priority dedicated VLAN with a thin clients and a PC running both RDP 5.x and 6.x.  I’ve also seen video comparisons of RDP ver.N/A vs. ICA and ICA + SpeedScreen and all I can say is, WOW!  During my look into VDI via RDP for my organization, I came to the conclusion that the market wasn’t mature enough yet to allow for an expectable user experience.  I realize that windows 7 and RDP 7 are currently still it beta but I really think they need to get a jump start on preparing the market for this little jewel.

I want to see more technical detail on RDP 7.0 on the local and remote resource usage, I want a Vista and installable client XP (cross my fingers and please show your long standing customers some love), and open up to thin client manufacturers so that they can start developing/implementing RDP 7.0 into their thin clients. I’d also like to see it happen on the thin client side without heavy Microsoft licensing that drives the thin client price up.  We are already paying for the windows 7 license to we really need to spend a bunch more on a Microsoft thin client OS.

Currently RDP 6.X is only supported in XPe and 5.X is the highest that windows CE supports.  Each Microsoft thin OS that comes out seems to include more local features, more cost, and more power consuming processing and power/memory hardware.  At minimum come up with a truly thin OS that is ultra thin that just gets predetermined RDP settings and a path to the connection broker.

Also, would it kill Microsoft to open up a little and offer a Linux based RDP client package (possibly licensed to thin client manufacturers)... Talk about good PR spreading through the entire tech industry and making showing.  Then companies like WYSE, HP, and Dell could make a stripped down sub $200 thin client with their approx ~1.5MB base OS your RDP package built in.

I have only seen the Microsoft released demo videos of RDP 7.0 handling playback of remote HD content but I’d like to see how it handles the rendering of PDFs, and a few other things corporations user base typically work with (currently PDFs viewed with RDP 6.X over anything other than local Ethernet looks like dialup picture rendering).  However, it looks promising and I’m going to start running my own tests with RDP 7.0 between two Windows 7 boxes soon.

All of the previously mentioned information regarding RDP 7.0 and thin clients, if carried out, can only help Microsoft get off on the right foot after Oct 22 by allowing them to launch a more deeply penetrating lucrative introduction of Windows 7 to the enterprise-class marketplace.

Sorry, if I rambled on a little bit.