Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Prepare Terminal Servers

One of the greatest features of Windows servers is the Terminal Service (TS). This service enables you to publish applications to remote computers, giving them full access to programs running in the Windows Server 2008 environment. The greatest advantage is in deployment and maintenance. Since the application operates on the terminal server, it is the only place it needs to be installed on, updated, and maintained. Also, since the application runs from the server, you only need to deploy shortcuts to users, nothing else, saving vast amounts of time. And this shortcut doesn't change, even though you may upgrade or otherwise modify the application.

The WS08 version of Terminal Services also provides a richer experience for users than previous versions. TS now includes several improvements. It supports several monitors on the client system and also provides a new, remote application mode, appropriately called RemoteApps, which lets you publish just the application itself instead of the entire desktop environment. This makes the use of Terminal Services much more seamless to end users.

TIP: As you know, Server Manager cannot manage a remote system. Therefore, you either have to log into the server itself to use Server Manager or, ideally, you simply publish Server Manager as a RemoteApp so that it can appear to run locally on your own workstation. Do this for each server you need to manage.

Terminal Services runs in two different modes: Remote Administration and Application mode. The first lets you remotely administer servers and allows two remote connections at one time on a server. These remote connections can either be through RemoteApps or the Remote Desktop, which then gives you access to all of the features of the server because it displays the server's desktop on your system. Application mode is used when you want to publish applications to end users. This is also called Presentation Virtualization because it acts at the presentation layer of the network stack, providing users with a complete environment for application operation.

Thin client models are becoming more and more popular, especially with the proliferation of wireless Pocket PCs and the new Tablet PC device. Both have more limited resources, making server application hosting attractive to these user bases.

NOTE:
Many organizations rely on centralized application sharing or presentation virtualization. But with the advent of application virtualization, many are also moving to this model, because application virtualization only requires file services to stream the applications to end-user systems, whereas Presentation Virtualization requires massive server configurations, with lots of random access memory (RAM) and network firepower, since the execution environment is the server itself. Nevertheless, the Presentation Virtualization option is still highly useful, since it allows you to share Server Manager for remote system management.

Share Applications with Terminal Services

The Terminal Service is a core WS08 role. In fact, with WS08, Terminal Services can now automatically provide load balancing of terminal applications. For this feature to work, terminal servers must be clustered at the network level to work together to run a common set of applications and appear as a single system to clients and applications. To do this, they must be clustered through session broker load balancing. Once this is done, session directories can be used to transparently balance workloads between groups of terminal servers.

In addition, the WS08 version of Terminal Services supports roaming users. This means that users can open a session on a terminal server or terminal server cluster, disconnect from the server without closing the session, move to another computer, and reconnect to their existing TS session. This is a great advantage over previous TS capabilities. Finally, you can share TS applications through a new gateway service that lets users access these applications over common HTTP ports, such as 80 and 443, making it much easier for TS applications to cross the firewall.

Use the following process to prepare to use Terminal Services:

• Install and configure Terminal Services.
• Define your terminal server licensing model.
• Determine the application model for hosted applications.
• Install hosted applications.
• Define Terminal Services access policies.
• Define Terminal Services Group Policy objects.
• Determine how you will deploy shared applications.

Each of these steps requires care and forethought.

CAUTION:
Do not install applications on servers prior to installing the Terminal Services server role! Terminal Services requires applications to be installed in a special sharing mode that can only be accomplished once the TS components have been installed on a system. If you install applications prior to TS, you will need to uninstall and reinstall them after TS has been installed.