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Hi everyone,

Firstly, I wanna thank this community for resolving multiplte problems I’ve encountered during past years.

My question is about Remote Desktop Services with 2012 R2 / 2016 OS. What are actually the requirements if you plan to use it internally only? We have few applications that will be published via RDS. There are two users (branch office, slow network). Application saves local settings like language for example. Applications will be used only via RDP (no web access, we will share RDP file via GPO). I don’t have earlier experience from RDS services.

I think this instructions would be good for this scenario: Installing Remote Desktop Services 2016

However my questions:

  • I suppose I don’t need RD gateway, since no one connects from outside?

  • RD licensing server. This works 120 days as unactivated. How do I actually activate this? I do know that there is Licensing manager and from there you can click “Activate server”. Wizard starts which asks your name, company email etc information. Is this correct place? Should I buy licenses first?

  • I do need profile disks so that users can make personal changes without losing them?

  • Do I need any certificates at all? I mean if we are only going to use RDP files to connect. No https over rdp, no browser, no external users. If I do understand correctly, I would have to share certificate through GPO if we would like to computers trust this RDS and it’s services. 3rd trusted certificate excluded from this.

I guess these are all the questions for now. Please ask if you need more information before it’s possible to provide some useful information regarding this. Thank you for your help.

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(DragonsRule) 2

You won’t need to connect to the Gateway, but I believe it needs to be running for everything to work correctly.

Yes, you’ll need RDS CALs.

Not sure what you mean about disks… When a user logs into RDS a new folder is created for their profile.

You can use a self signed cert if you’d like. Or not use one at all. Up to you.

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However my questions:

    • I suppose I don’t need RD gateway, since no one connects from outside?
    • RD licensing server. This works 120 days as unactivated. How do I actually activate this? I do know that there is Licensing manager and from there you can click “Activate server”. Wizard starts which asks your name, company email etc information. Is this correct place? Should I buy licenses first?
    • I do need profile disks so that users can make personal changes without losing them?
    • Do I need any certificates at all? I mean if we are only going to use RDP files to connect. No https over rdp, no browser, no external users. If I do understand correctly, I would have to share certificate through GPO if we would like to computers trust this RDS and it’s services. 3rd trusted certificate excluded from this.

  5. I guess these are all the questions for now. Please ask if you need more information before it’s possible to provide some useful information regarding this. Thank you for your help.

1> If not from outside you don’t need.

2> yes, you wll license details on licensing portal of ms.

3> may be you are talking about roaming profiles not sure.

4> No need cert .

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  1. No

  2. You will need licenses before you can activate the license server so it has something to hand out.

  3. UPDs are like improved roaming profiles. Do you have multiple session hosts? If you only have one; roaming profiles, UPDs, or redirected folders don’t make much sense.

  4. No, you don’t need one. The users will get the “Do you trust this computer” warning when they connect. However, you can sign an RDP file and trust that via GPO if you really don’t want the warning.

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I RDP many new servers everyday so i added to bypass all

reg-add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client" /v "AuthenticationLevelOverride" /t "REG_DWORD" /d 0 /f
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Thank you everyone for the the answers. They were helpful.

So I have to buy 5-pack user cal licenses, which costs around 800$ / 150$ per user? What comes to User Profile Disks, I thought it’s required to have one if you wan’t user to be able to save his/her personal settings. If I understood correctly what Justin1250 wrote, they are only ment if you have multiple session hosts and you want to be able to have your settings when login to each of them. Now, we only have one sesion host and it’s not going to change anytime soon :slight_smile:

If you can confirm these, it would be very nice. It seems this can be marked as resolved very soon :slight_smile:

EDIT: Everything is now resolved. Thank you for the answers again.

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Check into Volume licensing. It only takes a purchase of 5 to open a volume agreement. You will save some off of buying retail.