Friday, February 12, 2010

Windows 2008 TS RemoteApp

Last month I pushed out a legacy application using Windows 2008 Terminal Services RemoteApp. I was very pleased with how easy it was and I won't go into setting up RemoteApp since there is more than enough documentation online for that; however, I will give a couple of points to consider.
  1. RemoteApp opens on the primary monitor and cannot be moved to another
  2. Disable the user screen saver on the terminal server. Otherwise, a user that leaves the RemoteApp up but idle will lock out their session on the server and they will need to restart the RemoteApp.
  3. Since closing the RemoteApp won't log the user off the terminal server, limit the user's sessions on the server. This can be done either through a group policy or RemoteApp settings on the server.
Numbers 2 and 3 can be done easily via group policy. Here are the settings I applied to the terminal server.

Computer Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / System / Group Policy
User Group Policy loopback processing mode = Enabled (Mode - Merge)

Computer Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Terminal Services / Terminal Server / Session Time Limits
Set time limit for active but idle Terminal Services sessions = Enabled (Idle session limit - 16 hours)
Set time limit for active Terminal Services sessions = Enabled (Active Session limit - 16 hours)
Set time limit for disconnected sessions = Enabled (End a disconnected session - 1 hour)
Set time limit for logoff of RemoteApp sessions = Enabled (RemoteApp session logoff delay - 30 minutes)
Terminate session when time limits are reached = Enabled

User Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / Control Panel / Display
Screen Saver = Disabled