Adding a Terminal Server

A Terminal Server serves published resources (applications, desktops, and others) to Parallels RAS users via Remote Desktop Services. A Parallels RAS site must have at least one Terminal Server but may have as many as you require.

Terminal Server Requirements

A Terminal Server must have the Remote Desktop Services (RDS) installed. RDS was known as Terminal Services prior to Windows 2008 R2. On some older versions of Windows Server, Terminal Services are not installed by default. If you'll be using such a server, you can install RDS on it right from the RAS Console, as described later in this section.

Note: In order to access remote resources, each user connecting to Parallels RAS must be a member of the Remote Desktop Users group on the server hosting the resources (i.e. the Terminal Server). Before inviting your users to connect to Parallels RAS, you need to add all your users to the local Remote Desktop Users group on the Terminal Server. For the instructions on how to do it, please consult the Microsoft Windows documentation.

Quickly Adding a Terminal Server

You can quickly add a Terminal Server to a site from the Start category in the RAS Console. This process is described in the Setting Up a Simple RAS Environment section.

The rest of this section describes how to add a Terminal Server from the Farm category. This process consists of more steps, but gives you more options.

Searching for Servers

You can search for servers in your Active Directory domain that meet the necessary requirements to be used as terminal servers (see System Requirements).

To search for servers:

1. On the Terminal Servers tab page, click Tasks > Find.
2. The Find Servers dialog opens and begins searching for suitable servers. If no servers are found, you'll see a message box where you can click OK to close the box and the dialog. In such a case, you can add a server manually (jump to the Adding a Terminal Server Manually subsection below).
3. If at least one suitable server is found, it will be displayed in the dialog.
4. Select a server that you would like to add as a Terminal Server to the site and verify whether the RAS Terminal Server Agent is installed on it by looking at the Agent column. If the agent is not installed, click the Install Agent button and follow the instructions. Make sure that you install RDS on the server too (see Terminal Server Requirements above).

Adding a Terminal Server Manually

If you couldn't find any servers using the functionality described above, you can add a server manually as follows:

1. Click Add in the Tasks drop-down menu to launch the Add Terminal Server wizard.
2. In the Server field, specify the server IP address or FQDN.
3. Select the Add Firewall Rules option to automatically configure the firewall on the server.
4. Select the Install Terminal Services option if the server doesn't have it installed. See Terminal Server Requirements at the beginning of this topic.
5. Select the Reboot (if required) option. The server will be restarted if Parallels RAS finds it necessary. Please note that this option is ignored if a reboot is pending on a local machine (i.e. the reboot of a local machine will not be forced).
6. Click Next.
7. In the next step, a checking is performed if the RAS Terminal Server Agent is installed on the server.

   If the result is negative (agent is not installed):

   1. Click Install to push install the agent.
   2. In the Installing Terminal Server Agent dialog, select the server name on which the agent is to be installed.
   3. (Optional) Select the Override system credentials option to specify and use different credentials to connect to the server.
   4. Click Install to install the agent. Click Done once the agent is installed. If the push installation of the RAS Terminal Server Agent fails (e.g. SMB share is not available, cannot push agent due to firewall rules, etc.), please refer to the Installing RAS Terminal Server Agent Manually section, which follows this one.
8. In the Agent Information dialog, click Add to add the terminal server to the Parallels RAS site.
9. Click Apply to commit the new settings.