Hey folks,
I'm grappling with some frustrating challenges on our RDS Farm set up with Server 2022 and would love to get your thoughts. Here's the rundown:
We have a farm on Server 2022 with both Gateway and Broker roles, running on ESXi 7 in a remote data center. We've got three office locations hooked up via stable VPN connections (ping under 20ms, bandwidth over 50 Mbps, and no signs of saturation).
Our users connect using mstsc from Windows 11 machines.
Initially, when we were using Server 2019, we faced sporadic connection issues with Outlook (M365 Apps) and Teams, which often prompted app corruption errors that required reinstallations. A fresh install of Server 2022 seemed to fix these problems for about two months.
We're now using FSLogix version 25.04 with both Profile and Office Containers. However, we've started seeing a resurgence of issues affecting certain users:
- Outlook often freezes on launch.
- Teams only displays a blank white screen.
Logging a user into a different RDS host usually resolves these issues, and resetting the FSLogix Office Container hasn't made a difference. We've also received sporadic reports of users experiencing connection drops, but our VPN remains stable with consistently low latency.
We have Sophos Intercept X Advanced with XDR on the setup, and we're currently experimenting with uninstalling it from one RDS host.
One possibility I'm considering is trying the new "Windows App for Azure Virtual Desktop" instead of mstsc to see if it works better with our Server 2022 RDS collections. Has anyone had experience with that?
I feel stuck and would appreciate any suggestions or insights you might have on things like FSLogix quirks, antivirus conflicts, RDS session management, or improvements we can make on the client side. Thanks so much for your help!
1 Answer
I dealt with similar issues before! We switched our Remote Desktop users to use Teams PWA and Outlook PWA, which helped alleviate some problems. I remember looking into the InstallAppXPackages GPO and maybe excluding TempState folders in the redirections.xml file for FSLogix might have been part of the fix too. Let me know if you want me to dig out my notes!
Thanks for the input! Unfortunately, switching to the PWA versions isn't feasible for us since the client relies on the full desktop apps. We ensured there are no GPOs restricting InstallAppXPackages and we're not using a custom redirections.xml—it's default without TempState folders excluded. I'd appreciate any other ideas you might have!