Remote Desktop Services for Windows Server 2008 R2 is the latest edition in of Windows remote management services. Server administrators have used Terminal Services for years to access their servers from client workstations and end users have used a desktop variation (Remote Desktop Protocol, RDP) to connect to their work PC’s from home, and vice versa.
Licensing has always been the main difference between Terminal Services and RDP. RDP allowed for one end user at a time to connect to another client computer that had remote access enabled. Terminal Services was a server side utility that allows for multiple users to connect to one server, depending on the license allocations.
With Windows 7 client Remote Desktop services are still available and you can configure them as you traditionally have. What has significantly changed are the Server Utilities.
Server 2008 Terminal Server Enhancements
Windows Server 2008 delivered a new suite of Terminal Services, including Terminal Services Gatekeeper, Terminal Services Session Broker, Terminal Services Remote Applications and Terminal Services Web Services.
Microsoft had also moved the Terminal Services functionality away from IIS to a new role in its own right. By seperating this service away from IIS has resulted in producing a superior set of remote managed services.
For example, by configuring the Gatekeeper and Session Broker Services, remote users who need reliable connections can recover quickly from network failures or disconnects and resume their sessions. Additionally, users that only need access to a specific application, or set off applications, can access the Remote Applications through Web Services and work remotely on an application through a web browser interface.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services Enhancements
With Windows Server 2008 R2 the Terminal Services role service has been re-branded as Remote Desktop Services. All of the Terminal Services functions that Server 2008 provides are included – along with a whole new set of functional tools.
The newer Virtualization services are labeled as Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI), and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V). They now allow for remote users to access virtual computing environments, instead of the traditional one-to-one mapping for a RDP session to a physical computer.
A fully developed VDI and MED-V solution builds services on top of Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Systems Center Configuration Manager, Systems Center Operations Manager, and Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack – MDOP. Then Remote Desktop Services can be configured to define and manage remote connections to these tools.
If you need assistance with setting up or configuring a Remote Desktop Service or Terminal service environment for your organisation we can help. Get in touch here.
