In the preparation of migrating from W2008R2 to W2016 I bumped into a number of problems that make me think that W2016 RDSH is not supported seriously by Microsoft. Here the list..

• Black screen of death : https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/f18fa9e9-2f5b-42ad-9248-38685542134c/remote-desktop-into-server-2016-gives-black-screen-same-issue-as-bug-recently-foundfixed-in-2012?forum=winserverTS
  
• Windows Update button must be disabled for all. (Including admins !!)
  https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/Lync/en-US/d736b25f-7546-4005-aabd-57dbaa6d139b/server-2016-not-2012r2-with-rds-how-to-prevent-users-from-rebooting-after-windows-update?forum=winserverTS
  
• Automatically created Firewall rules (Xbox rule... For a *server*... among others bloatware rules) https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/992e86c8-2bee-4951-9461-e3d7710288e9/windows-servr-2016-rdsh-firewall-rules-created-at-every-login?forum=winserverTS
  
• Edge unavailable... Edit 09/01/2019 : It is understood that Chrome is now recommended...
  
• Remote Desktop management console missing. --> Workaround : Using a W2008R2 console and connect to W2016 servers... flabbergasting.
  
• Search is broken for admins (search for an installed program fails. Search for some Windows component fails. (the latter have been improved since Sept 2018 updates)
  
•  "Print management MMC" can't be pined to taskbar with a right-click (drag-and-drop works). -----> seems to be fixed by SEPT 2018 updates.
  
• Sticky notes still missing  (W2012 solution still working http://techflute.com/how-to-add-sticky-notes-to-windows-server-2012/)
  
• Icon labels garbled. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/8e3fba8b-6362-48bb-8dd9-417a669fb265/icon-labels-quotsmudgequot-after-mouse-over-except-recycle-bin?forum=winserverTS
  
• lock screen :  User can't set its own lock screen timeout. Microsoft alternative : https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SetIdleTimeToLock-Lock-e34a4207. Real Alternative : Set "lock screen" to Never and activate the good old blank screen saver. See post below.
  
• Wrong keyboard at the lock screen : https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/4f312c17-fb5d-48be-91b8-edb1ba6caea7/windows-2016-lock-screen-wrong-keyboard-layout?forum=winserverTS
  
          https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/371624-keyboard-layout-change-when-screen-is-locked/
  
  
• Touch screen keyboard when locking a session . Solution  Disable touch keyboard service
• Redirected printers error : https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/2a5bf810-bc60-47e2-aee5-f5464a018434/w2016-redirected-printers-not-working-win32-error-code-returned-by-the-print-processor-50-the?forum=winserverTS#77c2531b-d81f-4631-9590-869eb214a5d9              
• Unwanted Services (and unable to disable them..) : https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/c165a54a-4a69-441c-94a7-b5712b54385d/what-is-the-cdpusersvc-for-?forum=win10itprogeneral
  
• Useful scheduled tasks : XblGameSaveTask XblGameSaveTaskLogon

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/c165a54a-4a69-441c-94a7-b5712b54385d/what-is-the-cdpusersvc-for-?forum=win10itprogeneral

•  Windows Photo Viewer (Aka picture Preview) missing. Solution : https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/14312-restore-windows-photo-viewer-windows-10-a.html#option2
• Some Printers keeps coming back. User with admin rights can delete them but they come back. Regular user can't delete them. Solution : Cleanup HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider\Servers\wprint64\Monitors\Client Side Port and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider\Servers\<your server>\Printers\
  

• Now struggling with slow updates.... https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/250914a1-b013-434a-baa0-639e31a839dd/whats-with-the-really-slow-windows-updates-on-2016?forum=ws2016&prof=required

• Smartphone not mounting anymore as USB storage. Was OK on W2008 R2. Android mobile. --> solved by using RemoteFX.

• Roaming profiles for Remote Desktop are not working. This is "by design..." The new design is to, err, resurrect the old design... See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3200967/changes-to-remote-connection-manager-in-windows-server

• What a journey...
  
  

We have a bunch of thin clients that just connect to our broker/gateway url (it's one and the same), and users click a saved .rdp icon and go. This has worked fine with our old 2008 R2 deployment, and after setting DefaultTsvUrl, it also works on 2016. So far so good.

However, if I try to just connect to the external address ("rdesktop.contoso.com") (obviously our actual address, not that) and have the RD Gateway set to the same address as well, the user is denied log in. I get some suggestions about why (loosely translated from non-English) "1. Your user account is not in an access list" and "2. you may have entered the computer name in a netbios format when a FQDN is expected."

I set the DefaultTsvUrl setting on the gateway/broker to match the default TSV url I wanted, and if I'm local and don't use a gateway, things connect flawlessly - so that means my local users can work and that's the major hurdle.

The RDP that downloads from RDWeb works fine at least locally, but looking at its content I see gatewayusagemethod:i:2 which would mean it is set to bypass local addresses, so I'm probably connecting without a gateway when it works.

So anyone have any ideas of where things go wrong? I'm loath to deploy this to users until this is resolved. Thanks.

We have a 3 node Windows 2016 RDSH farm with UPD and user redirected folders enabled. After much trial and error we also managed to customise the start menu, exported it to an .xml and redirect all users start menu to this file. This seemed to workfor a few weeks but we are now seeing issues with the pinned tiles disappearing. 9/10 times the pinned tiles do not show but strangley on the odd occasion they do display correctly. There is no obvious pattern to this. It can be for any user on any RDSH server. We have tried deleting a users UPD and redirected appdata but the issue still occurs. We cannot see any errors within the RDSH event logs for this either.

We've seen and tried several methods for configuring start menus for Win10/Win2016. We would like to define a manditory start menu for all users. Is the a simple, tried and tested way of doing this in Win2016 with UPD and user redirected folders enabled?

I have a RDS 2016 Farm, with 2 CB's and 8 RSH servers. There are 4 collections with 2 RSH in each collection.

The issue is when I connect and launch the .RDP i created for one session collection, all of the other RSH servers are provide as the server holding the .RDP session which of course they are not.  the session collection has a set of apps setup on only two servers which are added to the collection (no other RSH are available in the collection)

How do we isolate the RSH/collection from the other RSH/collections so only the servers supporting the .rdp are queued?

hi,

I want to share a fix rectangle area of my desktop(sharer) to my viewer, and the viewer can control(mouse and keyboard) this fixed shared area. i have finished it by using RDPSession an RDPViewer, that is supplied by AxInterop.RDPCOMAPILib. 

But, when the viewer try to control the sharer, the delay of operations(both mouse and keyboard) is very high. when i try to use mstc.exe to do this directly,  no delay of operations.

1、How can i fix the high delay of operation by using RDPSession or RDPViewer？ 

2、If the delay between the RDPSession and RDPViewer can't be reduce, is there some other way to share and control a fix rectangle area of my desktop?

the following is my code:

        private void shareButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Rectangle rect = Screen.GetBounds(this);
            m_rdpSession = new RDPSession();
            m_rdpSession.OnAttendeeConnected += m_rdpSession_OnAttendeeConnected;

            Rectangle shareArea = new Rectangle(axRDPViewer1.Location.X, axRDPViewer1.Location.Y, axRDPViewer1.ClientRectangle.Width, axRDPViewer1.ClientRectangle.Height);
            m_rdpSession.SetDesktopSharedRect(shareArea.Left, shareArea.Top, shareArea.Right, shareArea.Bottom);
            m_rdpSession.Open();

            IRDPSRAPIInvitation invitation = m_rdpSession.Invitations.CreateInvitation("baseAuth", "groupName", "", 64); 
            textBox2.Text = invitation.ConnectionString;
        }

        void m_rdpSession_OnAttendeeConnected(object pAttendee)
        {
            //viewer can contorl sharing area
            IRDPSRAPIAttendee att = pAttendee as IRDPSRAPIAttendee;
            att.ControlLevel = CTRL_LEVEL.CTRL_LEVEL_INTERACTIVE;
        }

and the viewer:

        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            axRDPViewer1.Connect(textBox1.Text.Trim(), Environment.UserName, "");
        }

Hi,

I have two forests(domainA, domainB) and RD Licensing server is in domainA.

May I know what are the ports to be opened from my RD Client to RD Licensing server to get the CAL licenses.

//Sampath Kovuri

Hi All,

We have a RDS farm with 2 RDS Hosts and 1 RDS Broker, the user profiles saved on a shared folder.  we installed a print server on both RDS Hosts.

Everything works fine until when users tried to edit a xerox workcentre 5945 settings (set print password, print on one side ..).

we found that the settings not saved after print process lunch and everytime user must change the settings.

im trying to fix it, thanks for your help.

hi we have some old thin clients. they have RDP 5.2 clients. 

can they be connected to server 2016 in any way ? any workaround available?

Running Windows Server 2016 Remote Desktop Services (session-based desktops).

Multiple session host servers, one DC, all running as VMs under Citrix XenServer 7.1. The servers are fully updated to present time as of 7 March 2019.

Every few days a user reports that after logging in to an RDS session he does not see his desktop but sees a black screen. When this happens, I can see that some users on that same RDS server still have their session working normally, but every user logging in after this also gets this black screen.

There are numerous references to this problem on the internet. It is apparently occuring since Server 2012 and has never been fixed.

Some people recommend to restart the Windows Audio service. Does not help in my case, never does when it happens to me. Other recommendations were to remove Firefox browser from the RDS session host servers. I did that two months ago and it seemed to help for one week but then it came back. I have not found any other recommendation - there seems to be simply no solution, except restarting that RDS session host server, which is a major inconvenience, it throws out the other users which still work, it takes 10 minutes or more to restart that server, and it can only be done manually. Most often it has to be force-restarted on top of it, as the server is totally unresponsive, and then some users may loose their user profile. Then I have to delete that user and recreate his user profile. Major trouble.

In the last few months I have rebuilt all RDS session host servers from scratch - total new installation, all updates, totally clean. It STILL happens. I have that system running since 2 years, and it has been a problem all the time.

When I try to log in to the console of the offending RDSH I can sometimes not even log in . Sometimes it does let me log in but I also get a black screen as local admin user (both Server\Administrator and Domain\Administrator). In this case, I can bring  up TaskManager via Ctrl+Alt+End and run a command prompt. I can restart services this way and execute other commands, but anything relating to the UI does not show up. Screen stays black.

Managed once to get the black screen off by restarting ShellExperienceHost service but then this logged out all users somehow and corrupted some profiles.

The only applications installed on the RDSH servers are Chrome browser, Thunderbird email client, Libre-Office.

From what I can find on the internet this problem occurs since the release of Windows Server 2012. This is seven years ago. I do not know if this happens to everyone, but there seems to be no common denominator from what I can find, it seems to happens on all sorts of environments, pointing to a bug within Windows Server itself.

From what it seems it is related to the new UI system implemented with Windows 8 (and Server 2012) because I can find no reference to this occurring with Server 2008. I have not run RDS on Server 2008 myself so I have no first-hand experience.

Is there ANYTHING I can do about this? It does NOT seem related to my setup which is really rock-bottom basic. Many users are reporting this as a dreaded issue they hope one day will be fixed by Microsoft.

Can it be related to the virtualization software? Anything having experienced that issue on bare-bone installs of RDSH servers? Any difference with Hyper-V VMs?

WHEN IS THIS GOING TO GET FIXED? THIS IS A PROBLEM SINCE 2012 - 7 YEARS!

I feel forced to start researching for non-Microsoft solutions for RDS type solutions because I simply cannot tolerate non-functional software. To the users it looks like it is me as admin who is not doing his job!

Atradius

We are running a 2016 Datacenter server under Azure. The server is primarily an RDS running Office Pro Plus and a couple of SQL backed applications.

Since Monday we've had problems with the user experience, with applications failing to clear down (Chrome was installed, would open once and close but then fail to open again - Chrome process remaining in background.)

The notifications for printing, new emails etc would appear but then fail to close afterwards. Left click on the start button would stop working and user experience was generally poor with noticeable lag on moving items on the screen. This sounds like a Shell type issue.

We have removed Chrome, disabled Skype for Business through GP, dialed down AV. We have run SFC /Scannow which found errors and fixed all except problems with Task Scheduler.lnk

Server is back up and we're waiting for it to happen again. Latest patch KB4489889 is applied, though this came out after the first problem.

What else might I have missed?

We have the following RDS 2016 configuration:

Server 1 - RDC Broker 
Server 2 - RDSH 
Server 3 - RDSH
Server 4 - RD Web Access & RD Gateway (sits in a DMZ)

To comply with PCI standards we would like to disable TLS v1.0 on our internet facing servers (ie: Server 4). If we disable TLS1.0, either manually through regedit or by using IIS Crypto, the shortcut within RD Web Access no longer works.

Has anyone managed to successfully disable TLS1.0 on their RD Web Access/RD Gateway server without breaking it? Any documention or guides on how to achieve this?

Hi,

I need an advice.

I have 2 standalone servers. Each of them have RD Web, RD Connection Broker and RD Session Host roles installed. Users are using Full RDP session, no Published Apps.

Each user connect to server via RDP to: server1.contoso.com or to server2.contoso.com
Everything is working, but when i need to install updates it is a nightmare.

How can i setup a single rdp link, for example: remote.contoso.com ? Like that if i deny new connections to server2, once the existing connections expire i will be able to update the server transparently and without interruptions for the users. I prefer not to use DNS RR. May be some Load Balance in front (like KEMP) ? I'm not sure what exactly i need to balance ? RD web or RD CB ?
Thanks,
S

Hello everybody,

I'm planning to install a new RDS farm with Server 2019. I'm customizing everything I need, but got stuck at the start menu.
How can I hide/remove the integrated Apps from start menu like Settings, Search and Windows-Security.
I'm ok with Settings and Search, but Windows-Security must be hidden before I can deploy this new farm.

Thanks for your help.

Hello,

We have configured a Remote Services setup on Windows Server 2016.

On Server01 we have installed Remote Desktop Gateway Server, Remote Desktop Connection Broker.

We have created 10 Session Host Servers. Out of these we have created 2 session collections - each having 2 servers. These are:

SU1 - ServerA + Server B

SU2 - ServerC + ServerD

We want simple load balancing between 2 servers within each unit (SU1 and SU2) so that half of the users will get connected to Server A and half to Server B.

This same configuration was working fine in Windows 2012. But is not working now. Are there any changes from 2012 to 2016 - which we are missing upon?

Thanks,

Rahul Jain

Hi,

I have a cluster of Windows 2016 RDS servers that get a random problem about once a week.

Users report that they cannot reload Chrome after they close it and Skype For Business stops working as well.   

After much digging we find that a svchost.exe process has jammed which is the Windows Audio Service.  This is stopping all RDS users from closing Chrome properly and Skype for Business starting.

If we manually end the process, all users sessions return to normal and it may not happen again for another week.

I have a feeling that this is something to do with the fact that the RDS servers are Hyper-V machines.

We see the following in the event log:

Hi.

We are rolling out RDS 2019 in our environment. We've got a lot of complaints about the DPI settings not being able to set in the session anymore like in 2008R2, but it has to be done on the local client, which is really cumbersome. However, when done so, we still have some applications with issues.

Now, for most of them I can fix it by setting the compatibility settings:



On a Server 2019 test machine, when set to Application, the application actually shows up fine. On RDS2019 though, it doesn't. I've been working on this for a while, until I installed a machine from scratch, do one step of our installation script at a time, and see where it started failing. It turn out as soon as we enable the RDS role, the DPI settings don't have any effect anymore, and the app is all blurry.

When I remove the RDS role, they start working again. Would anyone know how to fix this?

Hello,

We have 8 RDS, One Broker, Windows 2016 Std., on a Farm. 

We have GPO's Policies on those servers.

From Time to Time, some users are experiencing task bar freezing.

The desktop icons are working, but the task bar is freezing and you can not do nothing on the Task Bar.

The only way is to log off and log in again.

It there a solution ?

With Best Regards,

Haim

We run Remote Desktop Services 2016 and have noticed some warnings in the event viewer of our Gateway Web Server.