Is there a replacement for the removed "Windows System Resource Manager" feature in the Windows Server 2012 R2 release?

Question

Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM) has been removed in Windows Server 2012 R2, and I need a replacement.

I'm running a small RDP server on 2012 R2 Standard. It only has 8 GB of RAM and I need a way to limit resources for each regular user so the system doesn't grind to a halt if a single user takes more than his fair share (for whatever reason).

I can easily use Server 2012 (first "edition") instead, which only has WSRM deprecated instead of removed, as it isn't essential for me to use R2.

Is there any simple way to manage resources (mainly RAM) in Windows Server 2012 R2 since the WSRM has been removed?

Solution 1

So we're left with "Fair Share" resource sharing, enabled by default for Remote Desktop Services in 2012+, for CPU, Network, and Disk I/O. But not memory. So no, no memory balancing like we had with WSRM. Why did they specifically leave memory out of the FairShare policies? I don't know.

You can implement fair sharing of memory across virtual machines on a Hyper-V hypervisor, but that is not the same thing as a Remote Desktop Session Host. So as of this moment I would say that they've taken that very particular functionality away and left us with no alternatives. I suspect (this is conjecture) that is what Microsoft meant when they stated "Similar functionality is provided by Hyper-V." That it was sort of a naïve idea that "well, since the whole world is moving to VDI anyway, just use Hyper-V to balance memory across VMs." But again, I am ready and willing to be proven wrong.

Solution 2

You can setup Windows System Resource Manager on Windows Server 2012 R2. Even if it was removed by Microsoft, you can manually install it and use it.

I have listed the instructions here on my blog:
http://blog.iftvio.ro/index.php/windows-system-resource-manager-and-windows-server-2012-r2/

Related: My post in a the Microsoft forums thread regarding this.

Comments

[contrapsych]

So it appears there isn't an alternative, so I'll just use the first release of 2012. It's frustrating, because I need a basic RDP setup in a VM for a university project I'm working on, and I don't want, nor can I, set up an entire virtual environment with a bunch of machines with different roles or use more than my limited ram. Grrrrr.

[pauska]

I'm impressed by the work done by that blogs author to get this working, but beware. This is NOT supported by Microsoft at all. I'd be very careful about doing something like this in a production environment.

[raja]

If you have to balance memory in windows you likely have a poorly written app that would perform better isolated.