September, 2011

As I discovered in recent TechEd presentations in Australia and New Zealand, not too many people are familiar with the newest members of the Windows 7 family.  So let’s explore one of those in more detail, called Windows Thin PC. For the full marketing overview, you can review these pages:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/solutions/virtualization/products/thinpc.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/software-assurance/windows-thin-pc.aspx

To summarize, Windows Thin PC is a modified version of Windows 7 (built from a Windows Embedded Standard 7 base) that is available as a Software Assurance benefit (for anyone with Software Assurance on their desktop operating systems).  It has a reduced footprint (1.1GB compressed WIM, under 5GB when expanded on disk), and as a result has lighter hardware requirements:

• 1GHz processor
• 1GB RAM
• 16GB hard disk space

So it should come as no surprise that it is designed to be used as a thin client OS, enabling older or lesser hardware to connect to your VDI or terminal services infrastructure to run most applications.

Windows Thin PC has licensing restrictions that allows very few applications to be installed and used locally.  From the Thin PC FAQ:

Can I run applications on WinTPC?

Yes, you can run applications that fall into one of the following categories:

• Security
• Management
• Terminal emulation
• Remote Desktop and similar technologies
• Web browser
• Media player
• Instant messaging client
• Document viewers
• .NET Framework and Java Virtual Machine

However, you cannot run any productivity applications, such as Microsoft Office or similar applications.

Again, this is pretty consistent with what you could do with dedicated thin client hardware,

So what is it like to deploy this operating system?  It deploys just like any other version (SKU) of Windows 7.  MDT 2012 will officially support deploying this OS (since that where we’ve done all of our testing), but it’s not hard to get MDT 2010 Update 1 to deploy it too by removing the <UpgradeData> section from the unattend.xml that you use to deploy Windows Thin PC.

What does it look like once installed?  Just like Windows 7, but with fewer items on the start menu:

So it’s not an operating system for everyone, but it does have its place.

Be sure to read the great new posting on the “Building Windows 8” blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper-v-to-windows-8.aspx

(Read through the comments too, which talk about support for sleep and hibernate.)

There is one prominent statement made:

Hyper-V requires a 64-bit system that has Second Level Address Translation (SLAT).

That means you have a great reason to consider using the 64-bit version of Windows 8, and why you should buy only hardware with 64-bit support.  But what about the second part of that, SLAT support?  Well, all you really need to understand is that SLAT is a processor feature that improves virtual machine performance, especially when using higher-end video cards (e.g. those used on client machines).  Read more about the benefits in the Hyper-V R2 announcement:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd446676(WS.10).aspx

This mentions that Intel and AMD have different implementations of this.  Intel calls theirs “Enhanced Page Tables” (EPT), while AMD refers to it as “Nested Page Tables” (NPT).  Regardless, what you really care about is whether or not a particular processor includes the support.  That’s not always easy to figure out from the vendor’s web sites.  Fortunately, there is a newly-updated tool available on the SysInternals web site called Coreinfo that will tell you all about a processor’s capabilities:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/cc835722

Mark Russinovich updated this utility recently to add the ability to detect both Intel EPT and AMD NPT.  Here’s what the output would look like if your machine has an Intel processor with the needed support:

The AMD output will be slightly different (and not because it’s on a white background instead of a black one):

In both cases, the asterisk (“*”) in the second column indicates that the feature is present.  (A minus, “-“, shows if it isn’t.)  Be careful if running this in a VM or on a machine currently running a hypervisor, as these will mask the real processor capabilities.)

So check out your machines today to see if they are ready for Windows 8 client Hyper-V!