RDS in WIN8 Feature highlight no. 1 Better High Availability of the RD Connection Broker

RDS in WIN8 Feature highlight no. 1 Better High Availability of the RD Connection Broker

The RD Connection Broker plays a central role in the Remote Desktop Environment. That’s not a new thing of course, however, with the release of Windows Server 8 Beta the RD Connection Broker is now even playing a more important role than before. As with any important role in any environment, High Availability is crucial! It’s good to see that the way to make the Broker High Available has improved a lot in Windows Server 8.

After performing your first scenario based deployment and open up the server manager you have an option to make the RD Connection Broker High Available called “Configure RD Connection Broker for HA”.

Doing so launches a wizard to configure the HA. The result is an active-active HA configuration for the RD Connection Broker! By default the RD Connection Broker role uses a Windows Internal Database to store session information. As you can imagine, setting up HA properly for your RD Connection Broker role requires a central SQL Server instance (which is preferably also HA itself of course). That’s why the wizard will ask for a Database Connection String, folder and DNS record name.

I’ll do a separate blogpost in the near future containing a step-by-step guide on how to configure HA for the RD Connection Broker.