VPN connection

Question

Hi All,

I hope you will be able to help and offer some information regarding our current setup.

We have an RDS Server Farm consisting of W2008 & W2012 servers. These are marked down for Decommissioning due to Server Sunset on the W2008 boxes.

We use this RDS Server Farm to allow us to WFH remotely. When connected to the Server Farm we can access our File & Print Network shares along with the published apps on one of the RDS Servers. The published apps are used by many of our colleagues and require access on a regular basis. Our mail is based on O365 and so is Teams etc.

We have a Pulse-VPN application and it is configured to connect to London or Singapore. The users of this VPN app are all located in HQ which is located in Scotland. Once connected via Pulse-VPN we don't seem to get the user experience of our RDS Server Farm, for example we do not have access to our File & Print server and we don't get access to our users Apps. Various attempts to find a solution have been to no avail. We are not getting any help from our counterparts in other locations.

My question is would W2019 VPN-RRAS be suitable for our needs. Our office has approx 45 completely remote workers, and they require full File & Print access and also access to Apps that they use on a daily basis.

If I build a W2019 server install and configure a VPN-RRAS setup would it be as secure as any other VPN / RDS setups. Would I also be able to publish applications on the W2019 VPN server so that users would be able to use once connected to the VPN server?

Any help or guidance would be greatefully received.

Regards.

Answer 1

Hi

you could use Azure Virtual Desktop for the RDS requirement and then create a VPN connection back to where your File Server resources are located:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/overview

You can use either Azure AD or synchronized Active Directory identities.

When you use Azure Virtual Desktop, you can perform the following:

• Create a multi-session Windows 11 deployment that provides a complete, scalable version of Windows 10.
• Optimize Office 365 ProPlus for multi-user environments.
• Make your Line of Business applications available to all users.

Hope this helps,

Thanks

Michael Durkan

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