Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is to improve mobility and to access current sessions from different locations.

Reliability is a key feature for us.

The ease of use, as well as ease of integration within our security framework, are valuable.

We need to extend over a potentially slower network, and we have heard that performance over slower networks is not as good. I understand that there are other products out there that work better over slower networks.

In the next release, I would like to see better performance over slower networks, and integration with Linux, but this is something that we're going to get out of Microsoft in terms of a unified solution. It rolls out to bigger issues and access management with being unified with Microsoft and Linux.

This hasn't quite come together, I would have to get other products outside of Windows to get this to work.

The unified solution may be a cross-platform solution, which would be great in the future.

I have been using this solution for six years.

We are running a remote desktop from our workstations, not from our servers, and we are running an old Windows 7 version that is just about to be retired.

This solution is stable, I am not aware of any outstanding issues.

In terms of how we use it in our environment, it's not an issue for us, this solution is scalable.

We have approximately 50 users, who are mostly consultants. We are a small consultancy organization, and we are mostly IT.

I have not contacted technical support directly and I know the team doesn't have any issues with this. Usually, we get a reasonably good turn around time. Not against remote desktop, I don't believe that we have had support for that.

In general with Microsoft, it's been good.

Previously we experimented with other products, but for the moment we are staying with Microsoft remote desktops.

There are other products that we are looking for. At the moment we have four different platforms, and maybe having a unified solution might be the key reason to change in the future. We need a cross-platform solution. We have to have remote access, for example, on Linux Solutions as well, and we don't want to be running on different clients.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It's almost an out-of-the-box function once you have installed the other components.

Once you have set up your workstations and your servers, it's not a big deal to switch on and enable and integrate with Active Directory or remote logins. 

In terms of testing, it took half a day to a day's work to ensure that it was working.

We implemented this solution with our in-house team.

Retrospectively, no, we selected Microsoft and used it.

We are doing some research at the moment to see what we will do in the future for our next generation of infrastructure and renewal.

It's a good solution, and especially if you already have Microsoft running then it's probably one of the better solutions to choose from.

I am not sure whether it's the best future cross-platform solution when we are running multiple workstation environments with different platforms.

I am really happy with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services in our current environment. We have no issues at the moment.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for remote desktop services.

We find the services are not as transparent as we would like for our integration with Citrix.

Stability is quite good.

We currently have 300 users. We do not have any current plans to increase the usage. It is scalable for our needs.

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployment took only two hours. We did it all in-house.

The pricing is moderate. 

• Resilience: Has alllowed our 24/7 acute hospital to run electronic prescribing on the wards with limited downtime or post-setup configuration.
• Thin provisioning: Our core applications mean that our WiFi connected devices can drop-off the network without causing patient record locks.

It has enabled our clinical staff to get real-time medicine prescribing information at the patients' bedside with a near 100% service uptime.

I think that the Single Sign-On (SSO) could be improved.

At release time, there was not a lot of information around. We invested some long hours researching. The documentation from Microsoft was difficult to find. Now there are plenty of step-by-step guides around.

I have used it for four years.

Initially, the configuration I setup used DNS round-robin. This was changed to a NLB setup on our session hosts.

This has improved the stability of the clients' Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connectivity. It has given us granular control over stopping connections for downtime/maintenance windows.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

We actioned this with a limited budget. We completed it all in-house with no external technical support other than searching on the internet and testing.

We run Citrix alongside this solution for our internet connected clients. Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) was used primarily over our LAN/WAN.

The initial setup was a little complex. Like any thin client setup, some applications are trickier than others.

I could not see the benefits of using Citrix as you require RDS CALs regardless. We see this solution as a very good value.

We evaluated Citrix.

• We have found this to be very stable with a quite straightforward setup. However, Single Sign-On (SSO) certificates are a little fiddly.
• Ensure that the underlying infrastructure is fully tested, robust, and scalable.
• Our early problems stemmed from our hypervisor issues. Because clients only heard it was the RDS farm, I took a lot of heat on issues that were out of my control.

The ability to actually interface with a Windows desktop is valuable.

It makes things easier. The app that they provide you works off Mac and Windows. Even if I have my instance upon Azure or any other cloud platform, I can just use the normal Desktop Services app to give it an IP, the logon credentials, and just log in. It is done very easily.

Then it lets you into the VN. It creates sort of this window for you and allows you to interface with the VN. You can treat it as a separate window among your other apps. It actually works as a very good app on the underlying OS.

When I am connecting, I can do so from a Mac command line. However, to log in to a Windows server, I need to use this client. If Microsoft can find a way to remote into a Windows VN without using a client like this, that would be great.

I don't know how doable it is, or how easy it is to do, but maybe it's a limitation of the OS itself. Having a secondary app to log in to a remote VN is not ideal, but the app itself is very good.

We have been using this solution for a couple of years.

It is stable. It has never quit or crashed on me. It connects me to what I need.

Even if the VN is slow, it lets me know that the VN is slow and that there are issues with it. The app itself doesn't crash, which is good to know.

I don’t know whether it can scale to a large VN subset, or whether it can allow me the capability to log in to multiple VNs at the same time.

If that would work, I don’t know what the performance would be on it. I suspect that it wouldn't be that good. For personal use, it is a great app.

I haven't used their support at all. I never had the need to.

I would say absolutely get this product. For enterprise usage, I don't know how viable it would be. I am not very aware of all the capabilities within that app.

The idea is that if you are setting up separate VNs, you have to click on to get connected to each VN. It doesn't sound intuitive to me.

If they have an enterprise offering that goes away from that experience, I think it would be usable. But for just managing your own VN form, it is real easy. It's a personal VN form.

It becomes easy to use since I am using a Mac. It is easy for me to use Windows when I'm using the remote desktop. It's very compatible with Mac. It's easy for me to do any of my tasks that require Windows.

For my university project, I was doing a data mining project. I had a Mac which does not support the Excel field add-ons that only Windows supported. The report desktop feature helped me to just commute into it.

The speed should be a little more. When you're pitching from Mac to Windows, it takes a little more time than what is required. It can improve its speed. That's it. Everything else looks fine. I just started using it a year back, so that is what I can point out right now.

It has been a year that I have been using this solution.

It's stable. Actually, it is fast and compatible. It's quite reliable.

As of now, I haven't found the need to reach out for support. Everything was fine, so I didn't have any questions.

I recommend it. You can actually use it. I have worked as an intern in Electronic Arts and they do use it.

It allows access to the computer from any location.

I can telecommute into the office. Since we have to be on a secure network, it gives me access into my system at work that is more secure than my system at home.

There could be better options and it could be faster. I haven't had too many issues with it, but it's just a very basic program.

I haven't had any issues with the stability of the product.

I haven't experienced any scalability issues. Although, I can see some issues with it but for a small company right now, it's working.

We were using a previous solution. However, I needed ways to telecommute to the office and I came across this solution; it seemed like the best bet.

In my opinion, important factors while selecting a vendor are reliability, support (if needed) and scalability of the solution.

Load balancing: RDS Broker servers divide user sessions evenly among the RDS Host servers that host the applications. You can install multiple RDS Broker servers in an RDS cluster; this is built-in and no extra resources are needed. Optionally, the cluster can be made Highly Available if needed.

High Availability (HA): easy to set up - once the MS SQL database is created and the RDS Broker servers have the needed rights, the database is created automatically and HA is enabled.

Applications are ready for BYOD scenario’s, since RDP is a multi-OS/device technology. No more app testing for client OS migrations.

The valuable features I mentioned assure a stable and highly available environment with maximum uptime for business users. Also, they assure that assigned resources (application RDS hosts) are optimally used, without the need for any extra administrator intervention or monitoring.

Currently, installation of applications on an RDS farm must be performed manually on each server. This should be more controlled and automated.

Also, application sources are mixed on the file system and registry level. They should be in separate ‘containers’.

We did not have any problems with stability.

There are no issues with scalability. At any time, an RDS Host server can be added to any server collection. Also, some additional parameters allow us tocontrol and scale the expected user load (session limit, RDS Host weight).

Technical support is OK if you have MS Premier support.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Installation of the RDS farm was pretty easy. Configuration is a little harder; you need to configure trusted certificates (RDS 2012 allows HTTPS only), add groups and group policies for users, RDS hosts, server collections, etc.

Once configuration is done, management is easy.

There are two choices for RDS CALs (Client Access Licenses). Device CALs are cheap but allow low user mobility and require a high management effort (‘static’ or ‘task station’ scenario). User CALs are 20% more expensive, but offer high mobility and low management cost (‘dynamic’ or ‘mobile’ scenario).

We did not evaluate any other options.

My advice is to start in a lab environment to thoroughly test your infrastructure setup and configuration.

Use User CALs, they give much lower TCO.

Also, for applications you envision to provision on RDS, test whether they install correctly on Windows Server.