Server 2019 RDS - Physical Computer RDP

[_techie_]

Hi.

 

I recently setup a proof of concept RDS farm, which was fairly successful to move away from Citrix as a possible cost saving.

I am looking at dealing with possible 1:1 VM assignments for our office/admin staff, and was wondering if anyone had setup RDP connections in the farm to physical endpoints.

I know you can do with this with Citrix, but can't seem to find out with RDP. I know you can do Virtualisation hosts and individual VM's on that host, but that will require us to buy some new hardware!

also, can you only run a virtualisation host on Hyper-V? We currently ran the Session host on vmware, which was fine.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks

Mark

[Steve21]

I mean you "can" do it to end machines, wouldn't advise it, just by deploying a RDP file that points to said machine. (Unless you really want to go adding in every single machine on load balancing)

 

But is this for remote access or full thin client?

 

Steve

[_techie_]

Yes it’s just for remote access. We set this up temporarily for a few staff using our current XenApp, and creating an RDP file per user to double hop, once logged onto Citrix as they had specific software we didn’t want to install on our XenApp session hosts.

Not ideal by any means.

O

I did a trial of XenDesktop and you can install the Citrix VDA on physical machines and present them in Storefront. I didn’t want to open up port 3389 to the internet you see by using direct RDP access.

[Steve21]

You don't need to open 3389 as it's the server that's 3389ing to the machine, it's then provided by 443 from server to client etc. (It's bad practice still, but it works )

 

I mean there's nothing that stops you using your VMWare as a shared host or personal, you'd just install windows server + RDP features onto a VM on it as normal and give that the resources it needs. So if you wanted to demo it, you could just make one massive/power VM with Server + shared host and install the apps on that. And use your current server to point to that one etc

 

Steve

[_techie_]

Yes I’ve already setup the proof of concept with a single session host on VMware running server 2019 via the RDS Gateway and enabled web client too to run on a chromebook. Only have to open 443 on the firewall for the web client to run.

It’s just the individually assigned VM’s vs Physician hosts I’m querying now... I don’t think you can do RDP access to a single machine using a collection on the RDS broker, but that was my question.

[Steve21]

You can as mentioned Just need to deploy the RDP path as the "program"

 

As an old example, this was done for access to a specific server: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2012/175934-rdp-options-3.html#post1511844

 

Just using a simple "program" deploy that runs mstsc /v "myserver", when they click the program it should remote direct to the server internally, or in your case "pc"

 

If you really don't want to use a shared session host (my preference), between the two options you mentioned:

 

Assigned VMs - More resources needed + 2 places to update software/config - But always turned on

Physical Machine - Less resources/updating - Likely to be turned off sometime and you'll get no end of complaints

 

Steve