Windows 2012 RDS Session Broker - RDP to individual servers

Hi, I am in the process of upgrading from Windows 2003 Terminal Servers using DNS round robin for basic load balancing.

I have setup 3 Win2012 servers as follows:

Server A - RD Connection Broker, RD Web Access, RD Licensing, RD Session Host Collection

Server B - RD Session Host

Server C - RD Session Host

DNS entries for ip addresses of Sever B/C RD Farm name.

All works and sessions are balanced as expected but if I want to logon to both Session Host Servers B/C at the same time to compare configurations then I can't due to the session broker.

Is there a way around this as quite often it is helpful to have an rdp connection to both servers at the same time with the same username.

Thanks

July 2nd, 2013 9:40am

Hi,

You may use the /admin command line switch if you need to connect to a RDSH server that is part of a collection, like this:  mstsc /admin

With Server 2012 you would normally have users first connect to the RDCB server and then be redirected.  So in your case you would not have DNS entries pointing to server B/C.  There are cases when you may still want to configure things the old way, like if you had old devices that do not understand how to send the target collection name to the 2012 RDCB.  If you only have a single collection you can configure a default so that the older devices will be redirected, however, if you have multiple collections then the old method is useful.

-TP

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July 2nd, 2013 10:45am

Thanks, the mstsc /admin does what I want.

Could you explain about the users connecting to the RDCB. How is that done?

I thought it worked the other way in that the user connects to a RD Session Host which uses a redirector to query the RDCB for an active or disconnected session. If there is already a user session then the RDCB redirects to the relevant RD Session Host. If there are no sessions already set up for the user then the RDCB redirects to the server with the least amount of session connections.
I therefore have a dns entry of

farm - 172.x.x.20 (RD Session Host B)
farm - 172.x.x.21 (RD Session Host C)

Farm is the target collection name.
I only have one collection with 2 RD Session Hosts.

Users rdp connections point at Farm

Thanks

July 2nd, 2013 11:36am

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