Let's Tech: How to Set Up RemoteApp (RDS) on Windows Azure

hey everyone and welcome to another episode of let's Tech today is going to be more or less a part two of a previous video that we did that I did that had dealt with RemoteApp and how to set one up in your on-premises data center so I'm going to expand that out to the cloud now so what we're going to be doing today is actually covering how to create a remote app server in Azure this is going to have a lot of benefits for you if you know if you need to do remote app work with people spread across multiple geographies you can put that out in the cloud plus it's a great way to get into the cloud if you've been kind of wandering and looking around for ways to get you know a a footprint in the cloud and you know getting an idea of how to you know put stuff out there asher has a really easy way to set this up rather than just standing up a VM and configuring a network and configuring a you know VIP and a whole lot of other things like that there's kind of a pre-built set of steps that are relatively easy but do require some little gotchas that i'm going to kind of show you here on how to set this up and get yourself a a functioning remote app server out in the cloud that you and your users can use also I've got a bit of a cold actually it's more allergy related so sorry if I sound a little nasally more nasally than I typically do today that's not any fun but hits as of this filming Jo starting into spring much as I am really happy that the warmer weather is coming back a my allergy and sinuses are not real happy with that so you don't actually start here at RemoteApp where you would probably think you would you're going to start up here at virtual machines that's the easiest way to do this now there's obviously a lot of different ways that you could set this up this is probably just like when I showed you the all-in-one before this is kind of a super simple way to set yourself up a remote app server that is maintainable by you not lock down where you have to upload a new gold image every time you need to build anyone what you're going to do is start by creating a new virtual machine and we're going to do a gallery VM because the azure team just a little under a month ago added us a new one that we could use specifically for this purpose so we're going to go from gallery and we're going to pick this one here called Remote Desktop session host so this is the remote app team's image that has been uploaded for you we click Next and then you'll notice that they they have a three nine release date on this so yours is going to always select the most recent one so these will have more recent patches and and any gotchas that they've found out there with this process will have already been done and fixed for you on here so always pick the latest release unless you have a good reason to do otherwise and then we'll get will give this thing a name so we're going to we're going to call this the 9z wait a minute I'm on which one of Manos let's call this remote app are a test 9z one or something like that right I'm going to pick standard now there are two different ways that we could put this out and build it but with a basic account it's an a0 VM so if this is just for your testing purposes that might be useful but a standard you see is a fork or seven gig box and for doing any you know you know any heavier workloads you might want to go with a little bit bigger box you might even want to pick one of these big servers right you know 32 core 448 gigs of memory might be a bit of overkill but who knows what it what your process might be also there's another difference in the basic and standard that's going to be in the pricing model for add or remote app and this is worth taking a look at because it's it's a little bit confusing it took me a little bit to figure this out but so what you're going to be getting is a starting price per user per month is $10 for basic but you'll notice that the user cap is $17 per month so if you're just doing some testing or setting this up for yourself and you're doing this maybe on your MSDN account you might do basic and it's only going to use 17 dollars of your one hundred and fifty dollar allowance so you get through the MSDN or twenty three if you want to do a you know a full on standard information worker version of this so there's two reasons why you might pick either basic or standard so we're going to go with standard we're going to do a four-course outing gig and I'm going to go ahead and give myself a username and a password and then we're going to click this the forward arrow now it's going to ask if we want to create a new cloud service or use an existing one now I don't have a cloud service built here but obviously if there was one we could go ahead and you know piggyback on one that we'd already created basically that is a public IP address and container more or less for where you can get to this thing from outside of a sure I'm in the south-central us so pick your data center storage account it's it's going to go ahead and build one for you unless you have a storage account that you want to piggyback on and then we can create a new availability set but that gets a little beyond the point of to the scope of today's presentation you'll see that it's already gone ahead and giving you the RDP port and PowerShell port so that you can use Azure PowerShell and you could go ahead and add additional ports in here if if you needed so then we click forward and here are some extra stuff so for instance if we wanted to put like you know Microsoft's virus protection on this thing it would go ahead and put that on there but to keep things simple we're just going to leave all of the extensions turned off on that except for the VM agent so we really kind of need that so let's leave that on here let's give to the summary we're going to click the check box and you can see it's going to go ahead and start provisioning you'll see that it's staying stating down at the bottom that it is now creating the virtual machine we can even click details and see what it's doing so there's really three or four steps to this they work rather relatively quickly because we're building from a template so what we're going to do is go ahead and pause the video at this point in time and then we'll pick this back up again once it's finished provisioning this virtual machine and then we're going to do some stuff to it before we actually turn it into a remote app server and I'm going to go through some gotchas that some things that you really want to do before you create this and I actually realized that I had just made a mistake it's not a really big mistake but when I created the username you'll notice that I use the username of Chris later gonna wish that I had actually used something like Chris - for this process so make a mental note if you're making kind of some notes on steps on how to do this or playing the video back later as you're building one don't call it the name you want to call it like you know if I were to be using the username of Chris in this case I would use like Chris ABC or Chris two or something along those lines but we'll we'll work around that it's not a really big error it won't cause a problem but just make a mental note that that's what we're going to do so anyway this thing is cooking along pretty quick here and actually may not need to pause the video because it's already starting that virtual machine up because it's already built the virtual machine this is one of the things I love about Azure is it just does not take me very long at all to to get stuff started in you know whatever project I happen to be working on at the time okay so I did end up going ahead and pausing that ended up taking about five minutes longer than I expected it to but it did provision pretty darn quickly and it's up and it's running as you can see right there we've got ourselves a VM now right down here this is the important piece right so obviously the next thing we want to do is get in there and look at our VM so what we've done is we've taken a virtual machine and we've basically just set it up using the delete the default rather cache I I can't talk and and pay attention to things anymore let's just put this in here alright so I'm going to edit this real quick just so it fits on the screen better by taking that down to maybe like 1024 by 768 and we're going to go ahead and connect to it you see that it when you click that button the connect button it's going to go ahead and give you a prebuilt you know RDP remote desktop connection thing here so I'm gonna go ahead and say dot backslash Chris and I'm going to go ahead and connect to it and tell it I don't care about the certificate not matching the name or not being trusted or whatever I'll have to do that twice and there's the other one okay so where we're at now is about to be logging into the desktop on this machine and clearly I shouldn't have used 1024 by 768 because I doesn't fit on my screen very good but as you can see we are actually logging on to just a standard virtual machine so the only real big things that the folks over there at Azure RemoteApp did was go ahead and install some rolls on here that weren't previously on it so they've also given some little PowerShell script 'lets once the desktop comes up I'll show you what those do but they've also making sure that the VM was built in an appropriate manner so that it actually can become a remote app server so we're going to go ahead and validate that now so we double click this and we'll see that it's going through kind of a miniature prerequisite checker to validate that it is capable of being turned into a template and it there it goes all right current image satisfies all the requirements Roger remote app template image so that means we're good that means that this one can be but we're not done with this thing so we're going to we're going to actually do a handful of things to this virtual machine before we get there you may have noticed that the remote desktop licensing mode did not get configured automatically that's going to change after you turn this thing into a template and after you shut it down and then you know pull it in as a template to your remote app and then build a new remote app with it at that point it will be managed by a j''r but it'll also be manageable by you so we're going to do a few things on this so that we can make it our own right so what are some of the things that we might want to to put into our remote app image for instance I can tell you right off the bat you're going to want to have an administrator account that you can use to make changes to it later so this this is probably documented somewhere as something you should do I haven't really seen that but you'll see that by default we already have a Chris in here after you pull this into remote app there's going to be another one and that other user that's going to be in there is how asher is going to manage your remote app stuff for you so remember when I was saying that I should have called that Chris - well I didn't so I'm actually call this one Chris - Chris - and give it a password as well because the Chris account is going to get converted into the azure management account we're also going to go ahead and add that Chris to into the local administrators group there we go so later I can log on after this thing's been sis prepped and I can still manage this VM rather than having to have a gold image that's just you know everything that I'd hoped it would be and and have it you know static and non configurable and then every time we have to make a major change to this thing I have to put a new one of these together and upload it that would be a real pain we don't want to update it that way we want to be able you know in this particular scenario to manage it however we want to whenever we want to so a couple things like let's you know let's install office so I'm going to log in to MSD and pull in an office ISO and kick off the install for that so I'll pause the video for a second so you don't have to watch that occurring even though it's very very fast that's another thing you'll see as a benefit Windows updates if you do manage them yourself and happen incredibly quickly in Azure because well it's on the Microsoft Network already same thing when you download stuff from MSD yet because it's all in the same data center it comes down amazingly fast so getting ready to install some software does not take very long but I'm going to go ahead and cut that part of the video out once I have the ISO downloaded we'll go ahead and show you a little bit of a gotcha that you'll run into there okay that downloaded actually counted after I click the download button and it it took right at two seconds so not bad for an 850 Meg file so I'm going to mount the Installer I so I tried this a few nights ago on another VM when I was setting up a new remote app server and it actually came down so quickly that when I right clicked and tried to mount the eye so it wouldn't mount because it actually hadn't it was showing up my desk so it hadn't finished actually writing to the desk I was still in the desk was still cash on one had that not mount this Bazaar maybe I didn't actually do it temporary storage D local see let's try that again mount okay it doesn't like me it could be similar the issue I ran into the other night where maybe it said it's finished the downloading but the disk habit catched up actually writing the ISO to the drive so let's right-click and go to disk management and see what it sees maybe it is mounting a bunch of ISOs but it's not showing up an explorer and yeah loading disk configuration information that's pretty awesome so loading disk and stop loading it and just do it silliness yeah that's probably one of the ISO is not mounting I when it does finish doing whatever it's doing here it's probably going to do the eye mount ADAT ISO and then I attempted model it again it was already mounted so assume does have some disk latency that we're going to be waiting on before we actually go to the part where we pause the video to wait for this thing to fix itself we'll try a few things just for fun as you can see there I tried to launch task manager and no joy was to be had so now I'm going to right-click and try to open a command prompt as admin right I'm going to right-click and I'm gonna I'm gonna keep right okay wonderful so this is the demo gods that hate me because I've actually set this is my third remote app server the first one I built was not even with template because I didn't have one yet the second one was kind of a quick and dirty walkthrough of using this handy new pre-built template image which that time worked great and now it's going to be me to me and it doesn't like me anymore so we we don't seem to have any response coming back from Explorer I have to imagine we're dealing with a disk latency problem of some sort and we're going to do a ctrl alt I think it's end home yeah I can't do ctrl Alt Delete in the thing so let's let's close that out it's possible my remote desktop session is actually what's dead here and not the let's see do to do 1280 by 720 see if that looks any better I don't remember what the resolution of this thing is see if it's just my session that's dead and if we have to we can always use Azure to forcefully reboot this sucker and we can walk through that too for those who don't watch a lot of my videos I don't believe alright so is the remote desktop connection that actually was hosed and not us I still don't like the way that looks let's edit that reconnect to it again and let's try 800 by 600 for those of you who are new to watching my videos I do not pre script anything I do not cut things out that's why it's called let's tak it's in the gaming mantra of the let's play in other words we're just going to put this out and we're just going to go through it I have an idea that morning I start filming and all troubleshooting will be left in the only thing I don't do is any grinding isn't if there's anything like downloading or some building VN that's going to take forever and it's just boring as heck I won't torture you by keeping that in the video but yeah it was listening to everything yeah and couldn't mount the file because it was already mounted yeah just as I suspected so yeah it was the wrong desktop session that was dead anyway I leave everything in okay so that's that's why you'll see me intentionally have bad things happen in my videos because I think that's a much better way you're not going to learn things unless you see other people have problems when everything is pristine and beautiful which it never is in the IT industry there's you know going to be frustration when you hit it and a lot of times we learn together okay so we're going to run setup and here's our first gotcha so as we start running this you'll see that this says this copy of office 2013 can't be used on a computer running Terminal Service to use office 2013 on a computer running terminal servers you must use a volume license edition of office but that's not actually true it will indeed let you you just click OK and then it says oh okay well go ahead and plug in your product key anyway now obviously it would be a bad idea for me to plug in my product key right in front of everybody here so I'm going to and I'm going to go ahead and put that in okay that's done make sure you click the automatically you know activate that way it will activate while you're still in this kind of remote desktop mode it's easy to fix later if you forget but anyway so we're going to head and put this copy boss's office on here to finish my thought from earlier why are we doing this well I'm trying to think of things that you might need to put on your remote app install first thing I always think of isn't paint and calculator which are the ones that are built in and allow you to publish I don't think a lot of people are a remote app being or calculator they're probably remote app being of business tools and they're probably remote app you know useful things that they're they're people are going to be needing to actually do in a remote app type of session anywhere they are so in this case I figure link and outlook and stuff like that would be would be good ones to publish so I'm putting the whole office suite on here I'll probably go ahead and throw some other stuff on here as well maybe I don't know I love internet explorer but you know a lot of people like Firefox so maybe we want to get Firefox to be installed on this machine and have that remote apt as well one one neat thing that you can do by having a remote app server you can kind of use it like a proxy server in a lot of ways as come on man we just do it right here silliness Emison is not responding maybe that's why we need to put Firefox on here right wait a minute work for Microsoft I'm not supposed to say that sort of thing so bing.com will you behave better perhaps no you're not you're not going to make it better maybe Google hates oh no they're all going to fight with me here currently does throughput today something of an issue good okay let's try Bing again come on man people don't want to watch me having trouble just finding the daggum downloader for Firefox gee whiz alright so we're going to do something here I have got to know all right so I'm going to do disc perf Y or Capital y or just - y and then we're going to do task manager and we're going to go to more details and we're going to go to performance there's a performance and okay so CPUs all four processors are fine we've got plenty of RAM committed bytes or fine disk is a little active on the C Drive not so much on D and networking we're not even using Network hardly at all here so of our four bottlenecks let's see we've got 300 this actually somebody told me the decimals wrong on the average response time so even if we put that at you know 68 71 yeah so it looks like right now our throughput issue seems to be on the the high side and there's probably reason for this I actually opted for on my MSDN version of my azure which is what we're running on right here to go to a dog food that is heavily congested kind of a free pot this isn't the type of performance I would expect to see out of the normal and I have a different answer account that's actually on a normal commercial type of account and I did not see these kind of problems for that so that's probably what it is probably because in Microsoft we all dog food new stuff and I can tell you that you know with a hundred disk percentage of activity during an install wouldn't be uncommon because well you're installing office right there's going to be a lot of stuff there but doing that on probably a very underpowered back-end disk device probably why we're seeing some performance issues here so until office finishes its installing processes things probably going to suck and you guys don't probably want to sit and watch that so we will pause until office is complete unless we can get the Firefox download or is it really going to be that hard to find Firefox just there we go let's go ahead and just really load this sucker down and kick off the the installer for that or download the Installer at a minimum and get that on there there we go we got a few things we can publish and a few things we can put out there so that we can see the experience of remote app and all right so it's running it security scan its extracting all right we should really be killing the disk response times now so there we go okay so we've got two installers running now and good time to pause the video and come back to this after we've got there so we can start talking about some of the next steps and some of the gotchas that I ran into the other night that you need to know about before you put one of these out there all right so it is finished and we've got a copy of office on here and we've got a copy of Firefox on here just to save some disk space we don't really need the let's eject that and then delete it we don't need this taking up disk space when we're trying to build our template image and stuff so try to keep this thin and another little trick that I've read is if you'll go ahead and pin to the start any applications that you're planning on publishing it makes it a little easier to find I've given people this advice because I read it but I'm actually see if it does us any good or not so we'll go ahead and do that and see if it actually makes that into let's say we want to publish word to and outlook and then we'll have our emails and our chats a--'s and our browsers and we've already got ie pinned here so alright so there's some stuff that we have that are you know added in so got past the gotcha of office saying that it won't install even though it will indeed install and at that point you'd probably want to go ahead and patch everything so we can do that just obviously by going into system security and then running Windows updates now I don't know that we're actually going to worry about this I'm not going to teach you how to use Windows updates because I'd be a bit insulting to you and also going to make the video much longer than it needs to be but you should update to anything that you're going to put on here to the latest version you also might want to throw in some stuff you don't think about right off so if you're going to be using emails probably not a bad idea to put you know a dhobi Acrobat on here a handful of other utilities you normally would you know think about later when you're like oh gosh we can't do that because if you're users that start using this start trying to open things or do things and it's not installed they're not going to have admin rights to be able to to do those later so just kind of think of this as a desktop image more than a server image that's the problem most important piece to that is remembering that you're you're building a server that is going to be used as a desktop for your folks right so let's take real quick a peek at the differences between this and just a vanilla image of Windows so just look at the roles and features that are on here maybe after it finishes that refresh so you'll notice right here that click click obviously files to our services that's not uncommon the only role that's putting on here is Remote Desktop session host so if you're going to want to do this yourself and not use the pre-built image that's really the big thing you got to have it doesn't necessarily have to be an image that is you know the the pre-built one that they've listed but the remote desktop session host it does have to be on here and then you want to do things like getting your dotnet framework on your desk for your users and can handwriting services and then you want to get where's it at user interfaces and infrastructure you want to go ahead and put the desktop experience on and so little things like that for those of us that are server people that are now providing a service to users as remote app we're really kind of treating the server a little bit more like a aid us a desktop and you can tell that this has been done without having to go through all this because the little Store icon has down on the Start menu and the store icon is on this in the box here so anyhow that's that's the biggies so before we do anything else to this once again you would run in Windows updates and then when you're done you want to rerun the validate image so it says it still satisfies the requirements so we're still good there all right so next step is to sysprep so what we're going to do is we're going to type in sysprep so I asked prep and then we're going to put an OBE out of box experience so the ooby and then generalize and then shut down when it's done and that's really about the last step in here so we're going to go ahead and run the sexy so where as that as a mountain oh it's an AHA sysprep yeah I have to be endless this prep folder alright so what it's doing now is generalizing this image so that it can be deployed as a template and getting it ready for you know kind of a rebuild if you haven't done spit sysprep much which I'm sure everybody who's watching this video has used it before it's it's just generalizing the operating system so that when it boots up the next time it kind of goes through the mini setup wizard and creates a new CID and a whole lot of other stuff that makes it possible to deploy this multiple times even though we're only probably going to play this once in most environments there might be people who need to stand up multiple remote desktop servers and you'll have this template that is always available for you to use for that purpose so this is going to take a couple of minutes before it starts to shut down and we move on to the next step so time to pause the video and I'll come back when it starts shutting its up okay so the remote desktop connection closed and the VM shut down and it is now in a stop state so now we can do more interesting things with this so you'll see this little button down here at the bottom called capture so we're going to go ahead and click the capture button to capture this image we're going to give it a little bit better well I guess that's a pretty good name it's got the actual date and although this stuff out here is I'm sure it's maybe the build numbers and I don't know but so we'll give it a description and we'll call it a mode app template one and this is really important you need to say I've run sysprep on the virtual machine so that it will delete the VM now that's one of the reasons we want to get everything done with this before we go through the capturing process so if you don't check this box you won't be able to import it in to the remote app on the next step so we're going to go and click that you'll notice that it's now registering that and it's capturing the image for us so that we can turn the virtual machine from being a virtual machine into an actual image that's going to take it a couple of minutes and so we'll come back when it is complete and move on to the next step and I was wrong it wasn't a couple of minutes it was actually a little under a minute so took about all of 30 seconds so we'll go ahead and click OK so you'll notice that virtual machines now show zero because we don't have any VMs anymore what we have instead is an image of a VM so if we go to instances there's no VMs images is here now so we have a VM image that can be used to do interesting things with and one of those is creating a remote app so that's going to be neck next sorry had a phone call anyway that's what we're going to do next okay so remote app go ahead and click on that and you'll see you've got this link for create a remote app collection but we're not going there we're actually going to go into our template images tab here and we're going to upload or import a template so you could upload one so if you did everything I just did but you did it on your own computer and you you know sis prepped it and you've got it all shut down you've got the VHD and it's sitting somewhere where you can get at RIT simply easily you could click this upload a new template name and it's going to send you the you know the Azure PowerShell modules and it's going to send you a PS 1 script and then it's going to give you a pop-up script that you can dump into that and then it will browse out and you can upload the VHD from your data center to asher so there is the possibility to have built this image yourself in your own data center of fact that's what I did the first time but we're doing this the easier way because we built this thing in Azure it's already here we don't have to wait for hours and hours for a you know a huge VHD file to upload we can just do this from that now there are some gotchas here if you go and you do it this way here you need to know a few things namely you have to do your VM as a version 1 because Asher doesn't support v2 VMs and you have to create your hard disks your your VHDs as VHDs not VHD exes because those aren't supported you don't have to worry about any of that if you built it in Azure because the VMS were naturally built in Azrin and therefore obviously compatible with azure ok so what is the virtual machine image that we're going to pick well we've only got the one that we've already built and it's wanting us to again confirm that we did in fact go through and run the app requirements powershell and that we did run the sis prep and you know the image validation script and stuff like that which we did we've covered that so it's just making sure that before it goes to all this work I must make sure you did your work so that it doesn't in the Pavan to get 90% of the way through this and have it fail so we're gonna call this remote app one actually we'll call it our a1 9 z and then we're going to move this out of northern user up into the South Central us and click OK and you'll see that it's just starting the import remote app template image to our a night and Z it's already finished with that and so now we have a template that belongs in our image collection so we can go in here and click new and it's going to go ahead and jump us over to creating a new remote app thing and we're going to do a quick create because we don't need a VPN and we're going to give this thing a name and this one actually is going to be public facing so I want to make sure I get a unique name for it and I don't think I can start with a number and must start with letter so what we would do is our a9z one right and again we don't want this thing placed in Northern Europe we won at the central us that's our template is so that's going to be the or the closer data center that has our template already stored in it again we covered the two different kinds of plans and we're going to go with the standard plan and it's asking me you know what subscription we're going to use or image we're going to use rather and so we've got this one right here that was the Windows Server 2012 uh plated on 3:9 and that's kind of confusing because it is not actually the wait a minute that's not the right one where's my template I come in it those are the Microsoft images not my images and that's not what we expect to see so Microsoft gives us two so just a little bit of background here as of this video there is a a trial version that has office on it on this you know standard 2012 and I thinking it's still got office on it if it isn't on there then they've already gotten rid of that trial because it was part of the preview this would just be a generic 2012 image and this would be one if you're using office 365 and if you don't have an office 365 subscription that's not going to do you a whole heck of a lot of good what we want to use is our own image and I'm not really sure why we're not seeing our images here template images oh it's still upload pending okay so it's not ready for us to use so it's still bringing the the template image over from I guess whatever other storage blob it was in to this storage blob which I don't know how long that's going to take but it will eventually make it here and then we'll be able to pick the raw one 9z RemoteApp 1 9 z image image during the creation process so we'll go ahead and pause again wait for the upload pending to say upload complete and make it an available template image and we'll move on to the next step and it has now moved on to import in progress and that sounds good it was probably waiting for another cute job to complete before I moved on to my job again I'm not in a normal MSDN if you're using an MSDN version of manager I'm not in the normal one I'm in kind of a rather congested one so that's why that's doing that I want to take just a minute to talk about some feedback I don't do a lot of return feedback most of that I do in my tank net site I've had some people ask why in YouTube I'm not answering some of the questions honestly I don't even see them sometimes for a month or so like all of you I have my day job this is not what I do for Microsoft this is simply something I do because I really passionate about technology and I'm very passionate about sharing what I learned in technology with other people so when I have time and I have something kind of interesting that I've done or learned I usually will find a way to blog it or make a video on it I do have a better tendency to get responses out on my TechNet blog and I apologize to anyone who's asked me questions and I didn't even see them on my youtube channel frankly I didn't even know that questions were being asked on some of those so if if that's happened my bad apologize I'll try to be better about watching for those questions as they come in but like you guys I've got you know a 12-hour workday a lot of times it's hard to get around that also some of the other feedback I got was you didn't like the background music I got quite a few of those so this video I'm not putting the background music in behind while I'm talking I guess that was annoying some people listening to to that so you know point taken and feedback received what's really funny is if I know anything about how this works is I won't have it when people will be like man I was so dry how come you don't have your background music going anymore I like that that was cool anyway so alright import complete it has finished so theoretically we now should be able to use this VM so we're going to go back in here again and do another quick create and we name again we'll call this once again RemoteApp 91 91 and move that sucker to central south-central us and standard and still don't have an immature dadgummit what on earth is taking so long for my image to show up when I build this sucker why don't you want to show me my way you gotta be da rude man alright so close that see if we can figure this out template images to import complete and Visual Studio ultimate South Central sure looks Oh upload date was 1899 that's at 6 p.m. even that's Wow that can't be right yeah December 31st 1899 that's really cool I don't think we even really had a lot of electricity I certainly didn't have computers you out the out you know the alter 8001 XIV invented until about 50 years after after that so seems seems to be a rather old image let me go in see if there are any options rename delete and add that's that's all we get yeah wonderful alright so maybe there's a time delay when the images get uploaded until they actually appear in the remote app collection options here maybe let's let's just assume that that's the case since we do have a valid template image on here and it just doesn't seem to be making it over to that other page so what I'll do is I'll give it a few minutes if that doesn't work I'll log out I'll log back in and if that doesn't work we may we may have done something wrong here I may have offended the azure gods of some way so pause it and we'll come back this isn't my normal normally my let stack is let's troubleshoot together but I'm gonna actually be troubleshooting anything since it's really not anything to do necessarily here I wouldn't even know where to look for that apart from you know obviously looking at my storage and saying you know in my blobs and my containers and my VHDs if there are stuffs is there which there's definitely stuffs is there RemoteApp template is is in here it's rather small doesn't seem like that is the right size maybe I'm looking at the wrong one there now seems to be two of these this could be interesting but what I was trying to say was that normally I would troubleshoot live and what are we looking at here 2015 oh four oh three so this definitely is our thing from today there's no question it exists we've got our 127 kick file sitting there yeah there's some old stuff that I had from from before not even not even yeah not even deleted yet even though the VM doesn't exist anymore so we've got a template it's there so I got to imagine this as a time delay mechanism designed to make you wonder if you're doing things right or not is still not listed okay well we're going to give a few minutes come back after if I actually do anything interesting that is troubleshooting related rather than sit here and just click on stuff well I will unpause the video for any of that otherwise I'm going to assume that a five minute delay or a log out log back end might fix it and I'll go and not make you sit here listen to me drone on about random nothingness so here goes the boss okay so evidently it's a combination of just a little bit of patience but also clicking the right buttons and also making sure remember this is a web app so we need to move from one field to another so there wouldn't actually any troubleshooting do you miss anything actually came back later this walkthrough coltain nature and I think what actually was going on here to reflect video to be sure when I first start kind of looking through this you'll see that there is no template that is listed so we'll give this NZ one change to a different feel and come down here it's still not there will change to south central US and then change fields back and there it is there's our guy I was going to change that standard as I mentioned but now we have the fields there so you can only create the template from the same region the same data center where Asher's running and so that's probably a good part of what we were missing before is I just a had not given it the minute or so that it needed to get populated and also I didn't switch back and forth make sure I was in the right Edison etc alright so we're going to go ahead and recreate this remote app application you'll so that it goes to creating and we can go to details and actually see all the steps there are going to be a few because it's actually kind of booting up the VM from the template more or less making a copy of that that file and then it's going to start booting it up and the provisioning part of booting it up is you know running through the system and first creating the VM then mounting that PhD a copy of it as the hard drive very says prepped it so as it boots up against any setup wizard so basically as you're waiting to and to get the signal from the VM but it's come up to the desktop and that will be our next step so I'll pause until we get to that that face all right folks looks like that made it made it through the process of provisioning so we now have an active remote app collection and I have the correct Mike selected now hopefully so it won't sound like it did a minute ago okay so here we go we've got the remote app we got remote app 91 he's up you'll notice that when I click on them we've got some to-do list tasks things that we could do you see publishing a remote app program is highlighted and pretty green I would actually say don't click this click this publishing button up here where we see the you know the the part up at the top the reason we want to use that is because there's actually some publishing that we want to do prior to doing regular publishing I'll explain why so first the thing we want to do is program with path so I'm going to have us do a couple of these because you're going to want to have that at least initially you might before you roll this out to your users whoa sorry you might want to to start off with a couple of utilities that you're going to use and then maybe remove these later but there's a couple that you're going to want to have you can always get to these through a command-line interface but the first one is we're going to want to go ahead and publish em STS C and C colon backslash winders system third and then MST SC Exe and this one will give you the ability to open remote desktop back to your own host there's probably a couple of other ways you could do that but this is the cleanest one because it's going to be right there where you can see it the other one's going to command prompt so we want to be able to get to a command prompt at times and I'll show you a couple of reasons why that so windows again system32 cmd.exe and there we go so it should start publishing those now we can go through and publish our normal stuff so you'll see that when I do a publish and to publish start menu programs when we go through the list of things that are in the remote app programs you won't see command prompt and you're not going to see a couple of other things that might be very useful to you and a remote app so if this is a remote app for you you definitely want to keep the you know the RO desktop connection where you can get at it easy and you want to have a command prompt where you can get to it fairly easily because you're going to want to maintenance the box from time to time and so having those manually published is is a good thing to do and why on earth are you not giving me any program ease to publish silly thing it's kind of nice you'll see that it picked up the icons for MST SC and for commands so we know we got the path in there right so let's try again for Start menu programs there we go it just wanted to be persnickety alright so you'll notice we didn't pin Excel to the Start menu but it found it anyway so we probably didn't have to go through and get all of these but some really handy things to have published for me anyway in a situation like this is I mean I use word a lot and I use link and I use outlook for remote app type stuff somehow command prompts listed here I don't know if that's because I popped it in there or if they have recently changed this so that that's listed it was passed not there so all right so that's that's probably good we've got we've got a few programs that we're going to have listed there and is there anything else I want to put there we did go to all the trouble of putting Firefox on there and one nice I might as well and everybody loves PowerShell so let's let's just throw it all in there anything else we want that I can think of most of the time if you're long cell - oh about a checkbox there we go most of your time if you're just going to like throw this out there so users can remote out their email and link and other things of that nature you know obviously they may not need to clutter up everything with stuff like they're you know OneNote or publisher not that OneNote by any means is a constant utility that I use but clutter it up with a bunch of stuff that they won't need until they open something right so if your users primarily open Word document it's not use RemoteApp - like author new Word documents you may not want to publish it there and then it'll of course always launch so any we're going to go ahead and publish those and get us some stuff listed in the remote app connection so the next part of this is kind of two pieces and what we're going to be doing is we're going to go get the software that is required for us to actually access the remote app server that's actually not the next thing we're going to do that's the next thing after the next thing we're going to do the the next piece of this is to make sure we have some information about the server itself so that's the template image you notice there is no server name here so that could be a problem right well luckily for us we did publish the command prompt so we're going to look around here and yeah there's really information about what the name of this server is all right so maybe maybe it is called our a9z one and we'll find out in a minute but at this point in time I need to know what the server name is so that I can get in and do some managing I'll show you what I'm talking about with that here in just all right so what we're going to do is we're going to go get the actual program that you put on here because a lot of you would probably just do the natural thing which is go look for remote app and desktop man it will not remote desktop connection manager how about I type the right program here remote Oprah mode come on re MOT e app and then go down to remote app and desktop connections this is the built-in windows remote app and desktop connections and I'll show you how to connect one you type in here and you type in the actual feed web feed aspects of your traditional remote app and desktops web feed you'll know about this if you watch my other video on how to setup your own remote app program then it's just built into Windows and it just sits here all the time yeah asher chose to write their own so they're not using the one that's actually built into Windows 7 and later client operating systems they've got one that is poured it out and you can get that from this address it's right there on your dashboard so you can see it's got an install client button right here you click that and it gives you the link to go ahead and download the client and you'll see that it goes ahead and launches it now you would go through an install process I do not have to go through an install process because it's already here on my machine but that's about the only thing that goes beyond what we just did but there's you know there's not a lot of complex to do that so won't waste your time with it all right so I'm going to log in and I'm going to use my handy dandy adder log on account you who helps if use the right password and bang and it now starts searching for any remote apps that we have so you'll see that the MST SC program that we had and the command prompt and Excel and outlook and all the happiness is right here so how does this look it looks exactly like it does when you do a connection using any you know standard remote app process so let's start with the command prompt so you'll see that it goes ahead and launches it the only difference here probably than the one that's on the built-in Windows 7 and higher client remote app is that we've already logged in and if indicated sir I'm going to have to log in and if indicate again here and you get the same show details you could actually see it logging in to the server in the background during this and actually I think yeah it's not going to work for of course I may have that piece of it locked down but it's it's beginning its first session and it's going to take a little longer there we go show details it would take a little longer the first time because it doesn't have my desktop profile set up you can see it's actually setting up personalized settings before it actually launches the command prompt remote app published app that we have going here some time in the near future there it goes okay so now we're going to type hostname and you'll see that it's not called what I was thinking it was or what I expected it to from the description it's called this so that's kind of like your first step right we need to type in hostname find out the name of the actual server that got created when we've deployed our template and then you're going to go into your MST SC app or if you didn't want to publish that obviously now that we're a command prompt you go to just MST SC and bang and now we've got two of them so we're going to go ahead and close that one out and then we'll go ahead and connect to that at you know lower low resolution so we can actually see what's going on and what you're going to log on with in your case is whatever username you created the second time not the first one so and I shoe because I screwed up and did it Chris on the first one so that's why I was telling you when you build the image and it asks you for the admin account name call it Chris - well you would call it you know Susie - or whatever if you know whatever your name happens to be and would not be weird for somebody who was named Susan who was just listening okay sorry my weird sense of humor if you do that the first time then you can name your additional admin account you know without the to put in your password and now you'll be able to get on the box with admin rights so that you can make changes to this to update programs add new programs that you will then publish for your users that way you're not having to redeploy your quote-unquote gold image every single time your app that you're publishing to your users gets updated so there we go we come in to said desktop this also can be very handy if like you need to remote in and just run something as administrator it's always not required to do that you understand because you you do have a command prompt you'll notice that this is not a an administrative command prompt what can I do that would show you that I can't do stow like ipconfig here's an easy one flush ans it says requires elevation well how do I run this thing is an admin it's not like I can right-click command prompt and say run as an administrator ok well that can be a problem you remote desktop into it you could run it from there or you could do another little trick right here and say start space dot and it'll bring you up an explorer window right here that is actually not running on your machine this is you know Windows Explorer on the on the server that you're doing maintenance on and now we can right-click and say run as administrator' whenever you have to answer a UAC value you're going to see this RDS admin that's built in to all remote app servers that you deploy this is how they're going to keep you up to date it's so that the RDS admin account could come in and change your remote desktop licensing server so that it works for you not to expire because that's part of your agreement with Azure when you have that you have you know the remote desktop license running on this thing without having to buy extra but you also have your account if you forget to do this the only one you'll see is RSA RDS admin you won't know how to log in and do UAC prompts because well you don't have admin rights to the box you don't have the password to that that account it may be your VM but it is not a VM that you have admin rights on so you don't want to cut yourself short always create that account now we can do IP config flush DNS and it should succeed because we're running this with the administrative token for for that user you'll also see something else in kind of bizarre and peculiar when I say Who am I will see that I'm Chris underscore zero zero zero when I say Who am I here I'm Chris - so this isn't just dual token this is a completely separate user this is the user you used to log on this is representative for me of the my Windows my Microsoft account and what got carried over to the account on that machine I mephitic ating to this server via my my Microsoft account the same one that I used to log on to my Azure and what you saw me log on to my MSDN page etc this on the other hand is the local account that we created and has local admin rights okay so this is this is your way of being able to get in and run things as administrator so you can keep your VM up to date you don't actually have to go through like the process of running Windows updates on this Azure is going to take care of that for you Azure is going to take care of the you know the licensing server which you is not licensed but if you ever watch for the prompts when you log in it'll say it's going to expire in something like three thousand six hundred and fifty two days really like that basically ten years so you're you're going to be fine with your remote up programs on this particular VM for well past the lifetime of the virtual machines supported life cycle at being a Windows Server 2012 r2 server so there you go alright so this is just you as the admin you as the user however now have your ability to open up your words and your excels and your powerpoints and whatever let's just do a simple one and open up word word in my case is not activated because I didn't go through that first process and I haven't done the recommended settings this is something that you'll have to do the first time the use recommended settings and if you don't have an account you can't this requires a UAC prompt so you can do and ask me later but you've got to get this going for a user so we say that guess what you get a UAC prompt if you don't have it word says oh sorry there's a problem I want to activate bla bla bla you go through all this you can get there but you don't want users having to do that every single time they open so you need to get into the recommended settings thing at least once so that every time they launch that they don't have to go through that that mess so let me do that again kind of show you what I'm talking about now you don't want to activate right now I guess it doesn't keep doing it well whatever so okay here we go we have a word that is running as a remote app somewhere out there in the cloud then you can get this set up so that you don't have to have it running out of your own datacenter which will be nice in my case as well because I have quite a few servers that have been running in my kind of little homegrown data center which of course is you know something I have to make sure the hard drives don't die on I have to make sure that I keep adequate cooling which is expensive especially in the summer in Oklahoma where it gets over 100 degrees for 30 days sometimes lots of their air conditioning to keep that going that I don't have to worry about don't have to worry about my switch dying in the middle today which happens I don't have to worry about Cox cable going out which happens I just have this thing published it's always running it's always there so what else should we talk about oh yeah so your user account where do we figure that out okay so user access so this this is where we can go and add additional users they can be any windows anyone with a Windows account so for instance my wife who has a Windows Live ID / Windows hotmail / Microsoft account does actually have that registered so I could actually make it so that it's okay for her to log on I don't have to worry about authentication I have to worry about power source an aunt or about any of that stuff I just make sure that her live ID is in here now you could you could go through and do this authentication with a domain controller set the DC up join this thing to do there's a lot of ways you could set up authentication for this you can even do a bulk add users right here and put a CSV file in for their email addresses but you know there there are various ways I mean for me this is easiest if I just use the Windows Live ID then I'm having to manage the passwords I'm having to reset passwords it's just you know a live account whereas let's say you know my buddy you know Bob Hartley who is you know not signed up with Windows Live account I can't give that to him because he's not registered with a Microsoft account so anyway that's how we would be able to do some user ads here and that's kind of interesting wonder why that's purple because if you guys watch our gaming videos you know that she's purple girl 9z and Wow she loves purple and somehow she got purple as her heart color okay Caitlyn gets one too that's really kind of funny so I guess that that's just additional user color even though it would be kind of neat if they had some he'll discover that was purple so anyway we click Save we're giving Lisa user access she now has access to my remote app server and she can open that anywhere from any device that you know supports that type of thing and that's that's that step the publishing we already kind of talked about really quickly we'll cover some of these other tabs scale you know we picked the basic but somehow I mean we pick standard somehow or another it seems to have thrown us too basic I'll need to go through and figure out if I did that wrong or if there's a bug and the deployment thing but this is where you can flip that the sessions will tell you how many people are logged on right now in this case is just one it's me I can go ahead and log off disconnect or send a message just like you could if it was a standard terminal server that you were you were worried about the publishing we've already covered you can publish these you can also edit them and even put command line parameters around them so like if I were to take the the command prompt here and edit that and then you know ping W David bing.com haven't tested this so it'll be really funny if that actually does work but now theoretically if open command prompt it'll just immediately nope didn't work you know kind of a bummer but you will have some pro with still modifying it I didn't give it time it may still not work but we'll give it the I'll give it the old college dryer anyway other things you can do here obviously are unpublish if you decide you don't want excel on here anymore I can say goodbye Excel I'm going to go back to Lotus 1-2-3 or VisiCalc or something like that you can we've already looked at the Edit screen and we'll test and see how for a little ping this will be really funny if this actually works yeah bummer did not work so we did the user access and the dashboard here that will give you kind of some usage statistics and the link to the Rouen desktop client as we had mentioned before and then from the general page up here when we have this highlighted you can do update which means okay I have a new version of my gold image and I want to replace that with this without kicking all my users off without warning or go ahead and just kick them off and update it so if you do have a new image template the gold image you've just decided hey this is this is you know Server 2012 r2 but now the new version of server the threshold stuff is released I'm going to replace it with that you build it you get it up there you get it going you say okay I'm ready bang you push this and it'll it'll go ahead and take care of that for you using this screen right here plus if we ever decided we wanted to just ditch this whole project we just hit delete and we can kill that sucker it'll still be capable of coming back though because remember we had our template images you can just redeploy the amount of time I had paused was probably about 45 minutes or so of waiting for that I had you guys pause doing just a couple of emails and stuff and when I came back it was done so know exactly how how long it took but it wasn't too bad so if you need to redeploy you got to go through this and then republish your apps and then of course put your users back in but it wouldn't be you know devastating if you had to ditch it and get out of there I did not create a virtual network and I don't think we would need that in most cases and that's pretty much it really for the remote app so again my video on how to do one in your own data center that's that's already been published if you want to go give that try if you want to try doing this in the cloud I hope this has been really helpful to you so anyway guys this has been Chris with Microsoft and as always thank you so much for watching if you did find anything about any of this useful or interesting please give me a quick like also feel free to subscribe to my channel so you'll be updated and notified when I have anything new that I post out there also my blog is at 9z comm it's it's really easy to remember it's just the last number and the last letter com that's also got links to my Facebook my LinkedIn my Twitter etc and so then again thanks ton for listening and I'll see you guys in the next episode

Channel: bigdaddy9z

Views: 19,288

Keywords: Azure, Windows Azure, RemoteApp, Server 2012 R2, Cloud

Id: N7lNglzSbHc

Length: 69min 11sec (4151 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2015