Terminal Services is actually a group of five role services that you can install on Windows Server 2008 (see Figure 1).
This group of role services allows you to host desktops and
applications, manage client access licenses (CALs), load balance
multiple terminal servers in a farm, grant access to terminal servers
via the Internet, and use web browsers to access terminal servers.
A
few factors determine whether you need to install all or some of these
services. Let’s begin with an overview of the services to begin to
determine what your needs will be for implementation:
Terminal Server:
This role service allows the server to host applications or full
desktop sessions. Clients connect to a terminal server and access
programs or network resources directly from the server. This method of
providing applications and resources has several advantages: It
provides a single source for upgrading application and desktops, and it
provides the ability to work securely on sensitive information without
that information ever leaving the server. In addition, applications,
resources, and data are available from virtually anywhere.
Note
The
ability to access resources from outside the internal network requires
the installation of other Terminal Services roles. Later in this
chapter, we discuss several different scenarios for gaining access to
resources from outside the network.
TS Licensing:
This role service manages the CALs for Terminal Services. Each client
(user or device) that requests to connect and use resources from a
terminal server needs a CAL to do so. TS Licensing allows you to add,
monitor, and issue terminal server CALs to those clients. Only one TS
Licensing server is needed in a terminal server farm. Therefore,
installation of this role service is necessary only in first
installations of Terminal Services or in situations where redundancy or
local geography necessitates the additional TS Licensing role service.
Note
Remote
Desktop supports two concurrent connections for the purpose of remote
administration of a server. No CALs are required, and installing the TS
Licensing server is not necessary for these remote sessions to work.
TS Session Broker: This
role service provides two functions. First, it allows you to split the
load among several terminal servers in your farm. As a user signs in,
the session broker looks for the server in the farm with fewest
sessions and connects the user to that terminal server. Second, the
session broker ensures that users who are disconnected from an active
session can reconnect to that session without losing any work. This is
accomplished by renegotiating the session on the original server or
moving the session to an active terminal server if the original server
in the load-balanced farm becomes unresponsive.
TS Gateway:
This role service allows users to connect to internal network resources
from any device connected to the Internet. TS Gateway connects devices
via RDP over HTTPS. The connectable resources can be terminal servers,
computers running Remote Desktop, or terminal servers running RemoteApp
programs.
TS Web Access:
This role service allows users to connect to a terminal server by using
a web browser rather than the Remote Desktop client. TS Web Access also
allows users to connect to a server or computers running Remote Desktop
via a web browser, if they have appropriate permissions for that system.
Now
that you have an understanding of what each of these applications can
do, let’s begin by installing each one of the Terminal Services roles.
Then we will look at how to configure and manage each role.
