XenApp 6.5 Users Can’t Logon After Logon Disable

During an after hours project, I disabled logons to a few servers in a XenApp 6.5 farm, waited for the users to log off, and thought nothing of it. I then shut the VMs down, completed the maintenance, and powered the VMs back on…only to find that no one was logging on. As an administrator, I had no issue getting logged on, but users were receiving a “The requested session is not available…” type error … Read more…

Load Balancing Remote Desktop Gateway with Citrix NetScaler Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, we setup a simple content switching vServer to front our Remote Desktop Gateway server. It accomplished two things:   Allowed Remote Desktop connections using the Windows RDP client with ‘Connect from Anywhere’ set to the RDG vServer address Allowed applications to be launched from the RDWeb web portal The vServer configuration is not quite complete. You may notice that connections from mobile devices don’t work using the RD client and … Read more…

Load Balancing Remote Desktop Gateway with Citrix NetScaler

It may seem a bit ironic to use a Citrix NetScaler to load balance plain vanilla RDS, but the NetScaler wasn’t always a Citrix product and it certainly has a thousand more uses than just an Access Gateway appliance. So today we’ll be using it to load balance and content switch our Remote Desktop Gateway server(s). First, I’ll assume that you’ve already got RD Gateway up and working with a publicly trusted cert. Next, we … Read more…

Office 2013 on a Remote Desktop Session Host

I noticed that Office 2013 had been made available for TechNet subscribers, so I promptly downloaded a copy of Pro Plus to install on the RDS Session Host farm. When I browsed for a license key I was astonished to find that there was no Terminal Services Enablement Key as there had been for previous versions of Office: You can see here that Office 2010 had this key: I was further angered when I went … Read more…

RemoteApp Icons missing

I ran into something strange when adding the Failover Cluster Manager tool to RemoteApp – the icon on both the RD web services site and RemoteApp and Desktop Connections did not show properly – here’s what I mean:   The above was taken from RemoteApp and Desktop connections – here’s what it looked like on the RD Web Services site:   As you can see, the Failover Cluster Manager app has the standard RDP connection icon. Something is … Read more…

TS Web Access Upgrade to 2008R2 – RD Web

Just got most of the upgrade done for my home RDS setup- upgraded the TS box from 2008 to 2008R2 – thus making it an RDS box (Terminal Services is no longer…it is now Remote Desktop Services). I also upgraded the Web Portal\RD Gateway to a 2008R2 box. I have got to say, with the upgrade are some MUCH NEEDED improvements. One thing I had never tried before was the Desktop Composition remoting (aero glass … Read more…