Building A Server 2012 R2 RDS Farm

Server 2012 changed the way Remote Desktop Services (formerly Terminal Services) worked and was managed. Server 2012 R2 improved up this and added more features, specifically the ability to shadow users sessions was the one that got us interested:

We decided to rebuild our RDS Farm completely rather than upgrade the individual components one at a time.

The first step is to build the servers that will be part of the farm, that is to install Windows Server 2012 R2 on them.

The following are components of RDS and the number of each we decided to deploy:

2 * RD Connection Broker
2* RD Gateway
2* RD Web Access
1* RD Session Host (1 initially as more will be added once we are finished).

Migrate Apps Between 2012 RDSH Farms

We recently decided to upgrade our 2012 RDS Farm to 2012 R2 for some of the benefits listed here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2013/07/09/what-s-new-in-remote-desktop-services-for-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx

Having built our new farm we needed a quick and easy way to migrate the list of published applications with all of their settings. There is no built in import/export functionality however powershell came to the rescue.
I created the appropriately named collection on my new farm and of course had to install the software onto the new RDSH servers. If the software is not present the below powershell will fail with errors relating to not being able to find files on the RDSH servers.

I ran the following powershell command on the new connection broker server:

RD Web Access Does Not Work With RDC Client 6.3.9600

I have recently seen multiple incidents when using the latest RDC client to connect to a Server 2012 RD Farm, specifically when connecting to a RD Web Access Server and launching remote apps. The RDC client launches but then just hangs before timing out. The problem seems to be because the 2012 Connection Broker does not support the RDP 8.1 protocol when the connection is made through a RD Web Access Server. The problem was for both internal and external users so ruled out it being an RD Gateway specific issue.

Remove Orphaned RDSH Servers

If you have an RDSH farm running Server 2012 you may end up in the position of having orphaned servers in the farm that are no longer active on the network. Unless the server is properly removed from the farm before decommissioning it will remain in the farm configuration. You would see the server under Server Manager > Remote Desktop Services without the option to delete it: