I just finished setting up an RDS farm and, as part of the setup, I needed to setup the RDWeb (Remote Desktop Services Web Access) and integrate it with our SharePoint 2007 intranet portal. I was surprised to find out that the process of integrating RDS with SharePoint was rather tedious and not very well documented. I found a few articles, including one on TechNet that explained the process, however they were either incomplete or geared toward setting up SharePoint and RDWeb on the same server.
My situation (and from the many forum posts I read, it seems this was the case for many others) was different – I needed to setup a separate installation of RDS (and make it redundant see post here) and then integrate it with SharePoint. After piecing together a few different articles, blog posts and forum posts and a healthy amount of educated (and some not so educated… 🙂 ) guesses I finally got it to work. Here is how…
First – the environment. This was setup on a total of 8 servers:
- 2 front end IIS servers running the Remote Desktop Web Access role only (setup with Windows NLB for load sharing and redundancy)
- 2 middle tier boxes running Remote Desktop Licensing and Remote Desktop Connection Broker (setup as a Windows Cluster, for redundancy). One important thing to note is that the RemoteApp and Desktop Connection Management service was also clustered as it is an integral part of the application list population function for the front end IIS boxes and the SharePoint web part
- 2 Session Host servers (load balanced with Windows NLB and setup in an RDS Farm)
- 1 SharePoint front end server
- 1 SharePoint DB server (not really related to the setup directly, but a part of the environment nevertheless)
All servers are Windows 2008 R2 Standard 64-bit, except the two middle tier clustered boxes, which were Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise 64-bit, because of the clustering. This is very important as it makes a BIG difference in some of the steps, especially in GAC registration (because of Windows 2008 R2) and certain paths I list (because of the 64-bit edition). If you have different setup, change details accordingly.
Here is the meat. This assumes you have a functional RDS environment, i.e. you can open applications via the standard RDWeb web site and that the RDWeb web site is setup with Windows Authentication, not Forms… If you have not done that, here is how:
Edit the C:\Windows\Web\RDWeb\Pages\web.config file:
– un-comment <authentication mode=”Windows”/> section
– comment out the <authentication mode=”Forms”> section.
– comment out the <modules> and <security> sections in the <system.webServer> section at the end of the file.
Now to the web part setup…
1. Edit the web.config of the SharePoint site you will be adding the RDS web part to, adding the following, in one line, to the SafeControls section. This can be the root site, or a sub site. Find the path to the file system from IIS manager:
<SafeControl Assembly=”TSPortalWebPart, Version=6.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35″ Namespace=”Microsoft.TerminalServices.Publishing.Portal” TypeName=”*” Safe=”True” AllowRemoteDesigner=”True” />
2. Create images directory structure and secure it properly:
mkdir “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\wpresources\TSPortalWebPart\6.1.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35\images”
mkdir “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\wpresources\TSPortalWebPart\6.1.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35\rdp”
cacls “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\wpresources\TSPortalWebPart\6.1.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35\images” /T /E /P NetworkService:F
cacls “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\wpresources\TSPortalWebPart\6.1.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35\rdp” /T /E /P NetworkService:F
3. Copy TSPortalWebPart and TSPortalWebPart.Resources DLLs from a server running the “Remote Desktop Web Access” role:
xcopy C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_64\TSPortalWebPart c:\temp\TSPortalWebPart /d /e /c /i /y
xcopy C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_64\TSPortalWebPart.Resources c:\temp\TSPortalWebPart.Resources /d /e /c /i /y
4. Copy the two directories to your SharePoint server’s c:\temp
5. Login to the SharePoint server console as administrator
6. Open Task Manager, go to Processes tab and click Show Processes from all users
7. Kill ALL Explorer.exe instances for your session
8. Go to File, New Task (Run…) and open an Explorer.exe instance (this makes it run as admin and no, it does not work if you just right-click on Explorer and choose Run as administrator)
9. Drag and drop the c:\temp\TSPortalWebPart\6.1.0.0_en_31bf3856ad364e35\tsportalwebpart.dll and c:\temp\TSPortalWebPart\6.1.0.0_en_31bf3856ad364e35\TSPortalWebPart.resources.dll into the GAC (C:\Windows\assembly)
10. Verify the TSPortalWebPart and TSPortalWebPart.Resources directories are created under c:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\ (do a dir c:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\)
11. Copy the remaining files into the GAC directory created by dropping the two DLLs in
xcopy c:\temp\TSPortalWebPart\6.1.0.0_en_31bf3856ad364e35 c:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\TSPortalWebPart\6.1.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35 /d /e /c /i /y
xcopy c:\temp\TSPortalWebPart.Resources\6.1.0.0_en_31bf3856ad364e35
c:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\TSPortalWebPart.Resources\
6.1.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35 /d /e /c /i /y
(the above three lines are actually one command, just concatenate them before executing. For some reason the blog editor is chopping off the end if they are all together…)
12. Recycle the site’s app pool
13. Populate the web part gallery
#In the upper-right corner, on the Site Actions tab, click Site Settings.
#Under Galleries, click Web Parts.
#Under the Web Part Gallery heading, click New.
#Select the check box next to Microsoft.TerminalServices.Publishing.Portal.TSPortalWebPart, and then click Populate Gallery.
14. Create images directory under the website root and copy all images from \TSPortalWebPart\ to it (PNG, GIF, JPEG)
15. Add the user account of the SharePoint web site App Pool into the TS Web Access Computers group on the server where RemoteApp and Desktop Connection Management service is running (it should already have the names of the front end Remote Web IIS servers). In my case it is the clustered middle tier.
16. Add the web part to the SharePoint site
17. In the web part choose RemoteApp and desktop Connection Management for Populate the Web Part from option and enter the name of the server/cluster where the service resides
Your web part should now have icons from the RDS Session Hosts.
Enjoy! 🙂
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