Enabling Terminal Services on the demo VMs

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I’ve had a few questions on terminal serving into the demo VMs. I posted a note explaining how to do this by using an external network connection.

https://blogs.msdn.com/lcash/archive/2009/07/21/setting-up-external-networking-on-the-demo-vms.aspx

Now the question is related to the number of connection. We have enabled terminal service on the VM but only for Administrative mode which means you can only have 2 connections to the VM. Something we have on the list to do for the upcoming Refresh 3 is to enable full terminal services.

You can enable this yourself but there is a few problems :

  • You will be enabling TS after applications are installed so that is not a good thing as applications won’t be configured fully for TS.
  • Office needs a specific product key to run when full TS is enabled. You can get a key if you have an MSDN Subscription.
  • You can create a client VM to sit in front of the AX-SRV-01 and enable terminal services on that. You can make that VM a Windows2008 R2 VM so you get the Win7 look and feel of the desktop. e.g.

SOD_ENV1

If you want to go down this path then you can get a Windows 2008 R2 VHD from the VHD Test Drive program.  https://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/en/us/solution-appliance-test.aspx 

There are quite a few steps to actually get the two connected but I’ll look to provide some notes on this in the future. Here are some basic notes.

  • Once you get the VHD you will have to get it running, if you are running Windows 2008 R2 then you will have to run it under Hyper-V because of R2 being 64bit.
  • You will have to join that VM to the domain that is on AX-SRV-01.
  • Install the AX client and point to the AOS on AX-SRV-01.

I’ve heard from a few partners that these scenarios are of interest so we’ll make some steps in Refresh 3 to better enable the usage of TS or as it is called in Windows 2008 R2 is called Remote Desktop Services.

Cheers

Lachlan

Original post at https://blogs.msdn.com/lcash