There are some excellent resources for setting up RemoteApp sources, Remote Desktop Web Access and publishing applications, so there’s no need to cover those again. Creating the RemoteApp and Desktop Connections Configuration File The wizard is simple enough, just click the Next and Finish buttons when prompted, the wizard will do the rest:īut what if you want to deliver the connection silently? Fortunately that’s easy, but it’s one of those things that just isn’t documented.
The bad news is that this feature requires Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but your migrations plans are well underway right?Ĭreating the connection on the client computer is easy – setup a new connection via RemoteApp and Desktop Connections in Control Panel or ask users to double click on a connection file that you’ve created on the RD Connection Broker. Too damn easy to do that with a small number of nodes rather than standing up some pain-in-the-ass configuration management solution that requires constant care and feeding.RemoteApp in Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services finally allows you to do what some 3rd party solutions have been doing for years – delivering published applications directly to the user’s Start Menu. I'd just patch/install/configure each manually during a service window.
Plus RDS allows you to mark a node to not accept new connections, so you have service windows once your current connections time out. There's a new Windows thing called Desired State Configuration that might be useful but I don't know much about it.įor a 2-node farm I'd never stand up a configuration management solution, the overhead is too damn high for your scope. We use MDT to deploy new machines and could use it in this case as well, swapping in new machines and old ones out. So any kind of configuration management solution that meets your needs should do the trick. You would use any tool that you could use to "replicate perfectly" (tongue very much in cheek) any other computer. Main goal here is to have the ability to replicate perfectly nodes configurations.
On a side note, do you have any method to compare nodes' configurations, to ensure everything is the exact replica of everything ? Again, tool or script based ? The question is : is this manageable by a tool (In the server manager maybe, if I've missed something) or do I have to script it ? I take the example of a single application, but all types of apps will be deployed (from the easy msi type to the strange exe without any argument possible). I'm looking at a method to ease the maintaining process, a way to centralise this on a single console. The goal of this is to have an identical behaviour on every single node. It's the deployment of a new one that bother me : I'm look to a way to deploy my application on the whole farm (here 2 nodes, will be more in production), to have an identical situation on both RD nodes. This is a POC, and its result will be a production equivalent, with more nodes, probably with HA on Session Broker too.ĭeploying basic applications like calc and things like that are obviously easy.