Deploy Remote Desktops More Easily on EC2 Windows with AWS Microsoft AD

AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD, now supports Microsoft Remote Desktop Licensing Manager (RD Licensing). With the new release you can now enable RD Licensing in your AWS Microsoft AD domain. This reduces the effort to deploy and manage infrastructure for Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop Services in the AWS Cloud.

Connections to Windows Remote Desktop Session Hosts (RD Hosts) require dynamically assigned Remote Desktop Services client access licenses (RDS CALS) from RD Licensing. To use RD Licensing you must authorize one or more RD Licensing servers in the same Active Directory domain as your Remote Desktop Session Hosts (RDS hosts). The new AWS Microsoft AD release enables you to authorize your RD Licensing servers by adding them to the Terminal Service Licensing Servers security group. As a result, you can now deploy RD Hosts and RD Licensing in the AWS Cloud without the need to set up and configure your own Active Directory on EC2 Windows.

By using AWS Microsoft AD as the directory for your Remote Desktop Services solution, you reduce your operational management overhead to create and manage an Active Directory in the cloud. This reduces the time it takes to deploy remote desktop solutions on Amazon EC2 Windows instances, and enables your end users to use remote desktops with the credentials they already have.

To learn more about how to use AWS Microsoft AD, see the AWS Directory Service documentation. For general information and pricing, see the AWS Directory Service home page.