Windows 7 Aero Glass under Remote Desktop Virtualization
For the last week or so I’ve been playing around with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Virtualization component of Windows Server 2008 R2. For those of you that haven’t used or heard of RD-V, it’s Microsoft’s free VDI offering, utilising Remote Desktop to initiate a connection and spin up a dedicated Hyper-V Virtual Machine for the user. Anyway, one thing that really bugged me was that I couldn’t get Aero Glass to work, no matter what I did. Everything I read said it should work, but it didn’t. Why not? Well, the answer was both simple and irritating. Aero Glass remoting doesn’t work under anything other than Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate.
This annoyed me immensely – why not include it in Windows 7 Professional?
I’ve never understood Microsoft’s desktop licensing models – it always just seems like a more professional application of Crippleware.
@Drew
really? maybe you’ve never bought a new car
And the worst thing is that this annoyance is hidden on the Microsoft website. I brought Professional thinking that all I was losing out on was Bitlocker and Language Packs which frankly didn’t bother me.
I had RDP Glass working perfectly from Vista RDPing to an RC1 version of Windows 7 but have now lost it using Win7 Pro RTM :-(
And it’s an £85 upgrade to go to Ultimate which just isn’t worth it!