In an earlier Wiki, we walked through the new High Availability (HA) feature of the RD Connection Broker (RDCB) in Windows Server 2012. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/10390.deploying-rd-connection-broker-high-availibilty-in-windows-server-2012.aspx If, after completing the steps in that wiki, we would launch MSTSC and enter the DNS farm name as the destination host (as shown below):
That would result in the error below. Why? Because we’re actually launching an RDP session to one of the RDCB servers, and of course that’s denied for our end user.
What we need to do is configure some properties in an .RDP file so that it has knowledge of the fact that we’re trying to connect through a HA Connection Broker.
These are the properties that need to be added:
full address:s:FARM.LAB.LOCAL workspace id:s:FARM.LAB.LOCAL use redirection server name:i:1 loadbalanceinfo:s:tsv://MS Terminal Services Plugin.1.Wortell_sLab_Ses alternate full address:s:FARM.LAB.LOCAL
If we try that as our end user, the connection bar would still show the RDCB DNS farm name, but we’re now logged in on the RDSH server.
This also gets automatically configured for your RemoteApps. RemoteApps integrated on the client are stored inside RDP files in the following location:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Workspaces\<Workspace-ID>\Resource
Editing such a .RDP file in notepad would (amongst some other properties that we left out here) results in:
full address:s:FARM.LAB.LOCAL alternate shell:s:||calc remoteapplicationprogram:s:||calc gatewayhostname:s:rdgw.lab.local remoteapplicationname:s:Calculator remoteapplicationcmdline:s: workspace id:s:FARM.LAB.LOCAL use redirection server name:i:1 loadbalanceinfo:s:tsv://MS Terminal Services Plugin.1.Wortell_sLab_Ses alternate full address:s:FARM.LAB.LOCAL
RD WebAccess also automatically points to the RD Connection Broker farm
So that’s how to configure your .RDP files if you want to connect through a HA RD Connection Broker. Original source: http://microsoftplatform.blogspot.com/2012/04/rd-connection-broker-ha-and-rdp.html
Freek Berson edited Revision 1. Comment: typo's
Freek Berson edited Original. Comment: Added a link to the source