Additional guidance published on: RemoteApp and Remote Desktop Session Host Farm Deployment Guides

Clark Nicholson from the Remote Desktop team has published additional guidance on previously released deployment guides on Microsoft Azure Desktop Hosting: RemoteApp and Remote Desktop Session Host Farm Deployment Guides. This also includes scripts to automatically scale down RD Session Host servers to save costs in an Azure Scenario.

“Hello everyone, this is Clark Nicholson from the Remote Desktop team. We have just published additional guidance to extend a basic Remote Desktop Services (RDS) deployment in Azure virtual machines. The RemoteApp Programs Deployment document provides steps to create a RemoteApp collection. This allows users to access Windows applications that are running in Azure virtual machines from their favorite internet connected devices.

The Remote Desktop Session Host Farm Deployment document provides steps to add RDSH servers to RemoteApp or desktop collections to create RDSH server farms for higher availability and scale out. Once an RDSH farm has been created in Azure, the RDSH scaling script can be deployed to automatically stop and start RDSH server VMs to reduce VM costs.

These documents assume that a basic RDS deployment has been created based on the Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide and the Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Deployment Guide. For additional information, please see Remote Desktop Services and Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines.

Note: Questions and comments are welcome. However, please DO NOT post a request for troubleshooting by using the comment tool at the end of this post. Instead, post a new thread in the RDS & TS forum. Thank you.”

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2014/11/10/microsoft-azure-desktop-hosting-remoteapp-and-remote-desktop-session-host-farm-deployment-guides.aspx

Scaling out RDS in Windows Azure

I’ve been working on a Proof Of Concept recently to use Windows Azure to be able to automatically and dynamically scale a RDS environment (specifically the RD Session Host Servers) up and down as needed.

“…Freek Berson a Remote Desktop Services (RDS) MVP developed this concept model on driving a solution for RDS in Azure. The question we ask when discussing this topic with Freek was: What if you wanted to get all the great enhancements to Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 R2 to securely enable remote users, but could scale up or down to meet changing demand—without having to pay for the excess capacity unless you were using it? Freek has been working on a proof of concept (POC) with one of his customers to accomplish exactly that…”

Read the article here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2014/02/21/scaling-out-rds-in-windows-azure.aspx