Complete Guide to setting up Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2016 

I could not even imagine that some can put so simple guide for something Microsoft related. Narration & voice color are like from the commercials. Watched this video, 2 days ago, 2 days in a row I"m browsing youu channel... Unbelievable!

It is very hard to believe that amongst some much rubbish on RU-vid, you can actually find a top quality video! Brilliant job Robert :)

Thank you for making this video , finally a fluent English speaking person who can makes how to videos .

Robert, this is brilliant! Thank you! It worked perfectly for me!!

Very informative, thanks so much for publishing this! :)

Thanks, It's nice to be able to watch one of these videos by someone without a thick accent

The way you explain difficult stuff is magical Sir!! More power to you!

Absolutely excellent! You left me in the dust a hundred times but, thanks to being able to back up and go over it a hundred times I got there. Very clear audio. Very clear presentation. Thank you!

Thank you so much! This is the best Guide. finally solved the internal application problems which didn't work with VPN

Hi Robert. I have struggled to understand most of the videos for the same topic. You just made it so easy to understand. Thank you. keep up the great work.

Thank you so much for your very clear tutorials. I have waded through a bunch of text and RU-vid garbage before I found you. I am not all the way through yet but you are the best teacher out there.

The Best tutorial I have ever seen. I have had to implement these services a few times and struggled with misinformation or hard to follow. Thank You for this

I deployed RDS during the walkthrough, absolutely brilliant video!

Wow, Robert, what an unabashed pleasure watching your video. Like other commenters, I'm not used to such a crisp presentation with such a precise and fluid speaking style. I'm now a fan.

Thanks Robert for your guidance and the precise instructions. Helped me out a lot!

Excellent video, easy to follow and explained well. Thank you Robert.

It is great stuff - even I'm not a server-side person even can understand easily what needs to do for remote desktop. Absolutely brilliant.

3 years later but this still is useful Robert. I needed a reminder. Thank you

Really clearly explained video. Thank you so much for making it!

Thanks a lot Robert. You made this video very much simple to understand. Hats off to you.

Great video, one of the best I've ever seen :)

Just what I was looking for, thank you!

Great tutorial. Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks!

This is amazing Robert thank you!

Excellent video easy to follow. After reviewing multiple You Tube how to videos, I found this video which helped me finally get Remote Desktop Connection to actually work. Thanks Robert...

Wow, so good that I pushed this out into production :)

Very clearly explained well made video, thank you so much for making this!

Awesome video. I sppent my whole day watching wrong viseos and it wasnt working untill i watched your video. Thanks Sir

This was so helpful, thanks so much. Very clear and detailed.

what a simple explanation and so nice voice. Top class stuff !!

Thanks Robert, a really helpful video, just the info I was looking for.

Thank you very much for taking the time to create and publish this tutorial. .

Many thanks. I always wondered how this was setup. Now i actually have some insight into my company have this setup.

Thanks for making this video, something to try this weekend. :)

Awesome manual. Thank you very much for your help.

Very good video. Easy to follow. Clear. Straight forward.

Impressive work. Thank you for this high quality video.

Incredibly well explained! Well done!

Great Video. simple to understand . Well done Robert!

All in details! You did a great job 👏

Wish you could create a video for the RD Gateway role. But this was a great refresher now that I have to do another deployment for a new client after a couple years. Highly appreciated!

Perfect!. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Robert. Very well explained..

This is really helpful. Thanks a lot Prof McMillen. :)

Great Video!!! thank you for publishing.

Thanks for this wonderful and detailed session on Remote Desktop Services.

Drafted this transcript reference from the Closed Captioning :) Great job, Robert! Thank you!! PART 1: (PART 2 will be a reply below) Hello everyone we're on a Windows 2016 server where we will install Remote Desktop Services formerly known as a terminal server. We are on a Windows 2016 domain controller but you can be on a regular domain member server or domain controller doesn't really matter. let's go ahead and click on add roles and features in our server manager and click Next . Now we have the option to install role-based or Remote Desktop Services. If we do role-based for RDS then we'll have to just basically install it piecemeal. If we install this option [Remote Desktop Services] then it puts all of the different options that we need in at one time which I like a little better. We'll go ahead and click Next now we have the option for standard deployment Quick Start or multi-point. So we're going to choose the standard deployment. The QuickStart does do some shortcuts for you but then you don't really learn anything. The multi-point Services is usually for a different type of server such as one that a school might use. Let's go ahead and click Next so we can start our installation. Now the option for virtual desktops which is this first option here, virtual machine-based desktop deployment or session-based. So the difference is virtual desktop or virtual machine-based desktop deployment allows us to create a different virtual machine for every user that logs in and we would have to install hyper-v as well and so we're not going to show that in this video we're gonna do the session based and that's where everyone shares the same server but they get their own customized desktop. Not as secure as virtual desktops but definitely less expensive and faster to deploy. Let's go ahead and click Next. Here are the three remote desktop services that we're going to install today that will happen automatically and these are the three minimum ones. We can install additional ones if we want. We can ignore all of them except for the session host if we want, but these are the ones that it wants to try to install at minimum, but I will go ahead and click Next and I'll show you how each one works. So we see the remote desktop connection broker service and we'll go ahead and click that. We want to add that service and then we'll click and then it's going to give us the option for the Internet Information Services or a remote desktop web server. Let's go ahead and choose to install that as well, and we'll click Next, and same thing with the remote desktop session host server. This is the only one we really need even though it shows us the three there and that's because the session host server basically keeps track of all the sessions and manages them. Let's go ahead and click Next, and now we'll go ahead and choose yes. You can restart the servers if you need to and click deploy now. This could take anywhere from a few minutes depending on the speed of your server all the way up to an hour, so just go ahead and watch as long as the bars are moving forward then you should be fine. It is doing the installation process and our server is now restarting so it was successful. We'll wait for it to restart and then we'll log in and take it from there. [Remote Desktop Connection Broker tends to cause problems, and may require TLS 1.2 so skip it unless it's really needed] We've logged back into our server and it shows that all of our different roles were successful. Go ahead and click close. Now I have remoted into the server using a Remote Desktop and one other thing that we need to make sure that we do is go into the control panel in order to allow this to happen and go to system and then remote settings and then make sure under the remote tab you have “allow remote connections to this computer”. Now if you're connecting to a computer that's a member of the domain, you can check “allow connections only from computers running this NLA type of authentication”, but if you're connecting from a non domain computer, which what I'm doing, then you can make sure that you have that unchecked, otherwise you won't be able to log in. Alright, once you have that set correctly, you can also click on select users. Now I'm only logging in as the administrator, but if you want to log in as other users you can go ahead and search for those names. Now that gives the right to log in using a remote desktop to a server. Now you'll have to be a member of the remote desktop users group, so we'll go to tools, Active Directory, users and computers, and from here we can go to and search for -- we'll just type in remote, and there it is: “remote desktop users” [the "built in" group doesn't work, must create a new one] group. You can just go ahead and click members and you can add anyone that you want to that group and they'll automatically have their rights to get in. So once that's done, we're gonna go to this new section here that wasn't there before, It says Remote Desktop Services. So we'll go ahead and click on that. Now anything that has a plus and it means that it has not been configured. If it's grayed out, it means it's configured and ready to use. So if we go to the tasks menu we can edit our deployment properties, we've already deployed everything, but now we want to edit it so we've got here a Remote Desktop gateway and remote desktop licensing. Let's go ahead and start by clicking on the licensing and we'll add our server that we're working with right here as a licensing server. Now by default we're going to have about I believe 120 days automatically added for unlimited use so as many as people as we want to have connected to it after that we'll need to add licenses into our licensing service so once this is installed, then it's going to look to this particular server to get any Remote Desktop licenses or client access licenses, or CAL's we call them, and we'll go ahead and click close. And now you see this is grayed out because it has been configured. Now we have RD gateway. So this is a little bit of a controversial type of role to add, so if you're going to be Internet facing, then I recommend you use the RD gateway and you'll have to use a public certificate in order to keep people from getting certificate errors unless you deploy the certificate using group policy which usually isn't an easy thing to do for computers that are already in the field, so you can't get group policy applied unless you VPN in first, and if you don't have VPN turned on and the computers never get into the the office then you can never get that installed, so I would definitely recommend RD gateway with a public certificate if you're going to be allowing outs users in it does. The controversy comes in where it adds a lot of additional security and sometimes it breaks things, so you can deploy this out on the Internet without the RD gateway role if you would like, and still use a public certificate, but I definitely recommend you add the Gateway because it does add additional security. But we'll just go ahead and leave that off because we're only going to be accessing this from the inside or from the LAN, so there's no need to have that gateway additional security added in.

Well done Robert. This helped me a lot!

Damn great tutorial video! Well done Robert, thank you

Helped me tons, appreciate it!

Awesome video. Much appreciated.

Thank you excellent video with clear explanations!!

Thank you Professor very helpful!

Well explained. Great job Robert :)

Thanks a lot, very clear and simple. btw it works on Windows Server 2019 too 🙂

thank for your easy English, your video.

This tutorial was great!

Perfect! Thank you!

Well explained, thank you sir!

Awesome video. Thank you!!

Hi Robert, excellent reference video, concise, precise and practical.

really great guide. Thanks

Liked and subbed. This is an amazing tutorial. Thank you.

waw, thank's very much.

Great video, thank you!

you are brillient sir .....good job

Excelent tutorial!!! the best one in the internet

nice tutorial man thank you :)

Excellent Video

Thanks! You are Brilliant!

Worth watching it!

Excellent video Prof. Do you have one where you discuss setting up Connection Broker on a separate server for handling RDS servers in a High Availability environment? Would like to see that because it is very different than doing it for 2008R2. Thanks again for the videos

Awesome THANK YOU

Very useful Thank you!

Thanks for helpful video

Gud job 👍...this video helped me

Subscribed. Thank you

Perfect, thanks mate

Great job 👍

Brilliant Sir

Very good Video!!

Thank you!

Finally a real good guide, thank you. But unfortenately you don't show how to use the regular Win Remote Desktop, the vid stopped just before that step, as I saw it - I was finnaly loooking forward to that part... Or have I totaly mixed them up? Then I¨m lost again. Since I can't get that to work with others guides so far. (I will try this guide tomorrow. More deep and bettter explained than others). Thanks Robert..

thanks a lot

Thank you

Thanks :)

awesome

Very nice video. I really liked the amount of detail WITHOUT all the techy stuff. Unfortunately, this did not work for me. I am trying to set up a 2016 Terminal Services server and I ran into an error where the Powershell remote something or another had to be active. Had to go back to the piecemill method and install the licensing. Thanks though.

Any guide for IIS deployment so you can access it over the web?

I'm currently trying this setup but for my remote users outside of the local network, how can I create the right certificate since outside of my local network I can only access it by port forwarding thru my firewall?

Thanks

hi, we have a server member of the domain but in a dmz (using a vpn connection), this server is used by a partner. Do we have to configurate the rds gateway role on this server? Reagrds

good summary of M$ RDS.

Hi Robert, great how-to, thanks for sharing! One question, does IIS need to be installed or the Web component inclusion will install it?

This was such an amazing tutorial. I only had one issue at the very end. When I'm logged into the rdweb and I try to launch the Remote Desktop Connection app it does not auto populate the server field. I was however able to manually type in the server name and remote into the server. Not sure if there is a fix for this. Also, do you teach any classes on Udemy or anything? I had so much fun learning this with you as the instructor. Thank you!

Users remotely using SSL/VPN once vpn connected need to RDP to another desktop PC and work. What is difference if i setup RDP server say user need to use application i.e. SAP application?

I need multiple users work from home using VPN via FW SSL and remote to a RDP servers rather than setting up many desktops which is not good approach what is best way?

Hello Robert, Thanks for the video. Please do you have a video on how to repair boot issues of server 2016 disk2vhd or disk2vhdx image on hyper -v?

Attached is the cert Command @Robert McMillen explains on 8:37 in the video.

Great Video! By chance do you have a video showing how to configure RD Gateway?