I'm getting ready to set up a 2012 failover cluster with a connection broker for rdp into file servers. Is there any way to manually move rdp connections from one node to another? All I can find is the ability to drain connections, but my users run statistical jobs that can run for a couple of weeks. If I have to wait until they log out, servers might not get security updates until a month after they're released.

Am I missing something? If not, what do cluster admins do in this situation?

If you set it up for the users to RDP into a VM and start their statistical jobs in the VM, then the VM can be live migrated.  RDP connections are simply connections, so those can be dropped without affecting the job that is running in the logged in session which the user starts.

So your issue is really patching the file servers that the statistical jobs are using.  It might be possible to create a Scale Out File Server (SOFS) for  that.  SOFS is designed for file services where a file is opened and kept open for extended periods of time, such as Hyper-V VHDs or SQL databases.  That also implies that the file is opened by a single user and kept open.  Without knowing anything about your statistical application, it is hard to know if that would work.  If the statistical application opens and closes lots of different files in exclusive access mode, that is not a potential use of SOFS.

Hi TR-CPC,

Please confirm you have assign static IP addresses to all the RD Connection Broker servers that will be a part of the Active/Active Broker deployment, and create a DNS Round Robin entry with these IP addresses and RD Connection Broker uses a farm name to determine which servers are in the same RD Session Host server farm. You must use the same farm name for all servers that are in the same load-balanced RD Session Host server farm.

Configure an RD Session Host Server to Join a Farm in RD Connection Broker

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771383.aspx

About IP Address and Token Redirection

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732852.aspx

RD Connection Broker High Availability in Windows Server 2012

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2012/06/27/rd-connection-broker-high-availability-in-windows-server-2012.aspx

Im glad to be of help to you!