Windows Remote Desktop Cluster - can we force some users to a specific server?

Question

Given an RDS cluster with NLB, users connect and login to one of the servers at random.

But there is one program that's only available on one of the servers (licensing reasons).

Can we force a group of users to always be logged on to one specific server, and let everyone else have logins allocated normally?

Solution

Not with NLB. If you need them to log onto a specific RDS server you'll need to have them connect to the ip address or name of the specific server.

Comments

[TessellatingHeckler]

But if you do that, it appears that NLB / terminal server session broker can still make the connection actually to a different server.

[joeqwerty]

NLB won't do that. You didn't mention that you were using RDS Session Broker. You could use a RemoteApp to direct these users to the server where the application is installed.

[TessellatingHeckler]

I can't see how that would work. If you have an open session on the 'right' server then you don't want to launch a remoteapp, and if you have a session on a 'wrong' server, the remoteapp login will hit the session broker and ... what, clash or takeover your current login?

[joeqwerty]

The point would be to launch the RemoteApp, not to log in to a session and then launch the RemoteApp. You could put a shortcut to the RemoteApp on their desktop, which they would launch. Then if they need to they could login to an RDS session and launch whatever other applications they need to use. The point being that when they need to run this program they only run it from the RemoteApp, regardless of whether they have a session on the right or wrong server. The other option would be to create a separate RDS farm for this server and have these users connect to this new farm.