Difficulty Achieving 5 Concurrent Sessions on Azure Bastion for Different Users on same server.

Question

I've been experimenting with Azure Bastion and encountering some challenges regarding concurrent session management. According to Microsoft documentation, Azure Bastion allows for manual host scaling to manage concurrent RDP/SSH connections. The Basic SKU provides 2 instances by default, while the Standard SKU can be scaled up to 50 instances. Each instance is capable of supporting multiple concurrent connections.

However, in my lab environment, even after scaling up to 5 instances for the Standard SKU, I'm still unable to establish more than 2 concurrent sessions for accessing a server via Azure Bastion. I understand that each instance should support multiple connections, but the limitation persists.

It's worth mentioning that Azure Bastion doesn't support connecting to a VM set up as an RDS session host, which adds complexity to the situation.

My objective is to enable five different users to access the same server simultaneously via Azure Bastion. Despite reviewing the documentation and experimenting with various configurations, I haven't been successful.

Can anyone provide insights or suggest workarounds to accomplish this task? Any assistance or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

@Niket Kumar Singh

Thanks for raising your question here.

As you mentioned, when you configure Azure Bastion using the Basic SKU, 2 instances are created. If you use the Standard SKU, you can specify the number of instances between 2-50.

Expand table

Workload Type*	Session Limit per Instance**
Light	25
Light	25
Medium	20
Heavy	2

*These workload types are defined here: Remote Desktop workloads **These limits are based on RDP performance tests for Azure Bastion. The numbers may vary due to other on-going RDP sessions or other on-going SSH sessions.

Now, the issue arises with concurrent sessions to a VM, which cannot exceed 2. This restriction isn't a limitation of Azure Bastion but rather a limitation of RDP itself.

• By default, a server OS will allow 2 user sessions simultaneously and 1 user session on a client OS.
• To have more than 2 sessions on a server OS, you need to install the Remote Desktop Session Host role.
• After installing the Session Host role, you will have a 120-day grace period to procure the licenses, install the Remote Desktop Session Host role, activate the License server, and install Licenses.

You can follow the link below for step-by-step configuration: Install RDS role service without Connection Broker - Windows Server | Microsoft Learn Test Lab Guide: Remote Desktop Licensing | Microsoft Learn