Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Reviews

We are a solution integrator and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is one of the products that we have been implementing for our clients. This software provides a Windows 10 desktop on a virtual machine.

It's a multi-session VDI solution that allows people to work from home. It allows users to access company resources and applications, which is important because we don't want them using their personal home networks to access corporate devices. This helps prevent problems such as the introduction of a computer virus from home to office.

The most valuable feature is the remote application access. You can update applications and assign them to different groups of users. For example, one user might require Microsoft Visio, whereas another user does not require it. Access can be granted by segmenting users into different groups.

There are problems with using Microsoft Teams within a virtual desktop on a mobile device. Specifically, if you are using Teams and conferencing, then there is no microphone capability. To be clear, if you install Teams directly on your mobile device then it will work. However, if you use it as an application within the virtual desktop that is running on the mobile device, it does not work. This is something that needs to be fixed.

I have been working with RDS for about three years.

Generally, this solution is stable.

Scalability-wise, it is very good. There is auto-scaling, so if there are more users required then Azure will help you to automatically manage it. In addition, it is HA, so I think that the overall scalability is pretty good.

I have not been in contact with technical support. There is a good community of people who write about Microsoft solutions in blogs, which is helpful.

Setting up the basic service is quite simple. It's more of managing your Windows image, such as a Windows 10 image, which probably requires some expertise. It is very fast to deploy and you can have everything ready within a day.

The setup is quite clear and you don't need a team to do it. All of the instructions are available on the internet and because it's a Microsoft solution, there are many blogs available with the steps for you to follow.

It will probably cost about $500 USD to get the resources set up in the cloud.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to first ensure that the network is set up properly. The applications need to be set up properly because if the applications are being used on-premises, but the virtual machines are stored in the cloud, then you will incur additional charges for accessing them.

This is a good solution, although it is still new compared to some other remote desktop services that have been out there for a very long time. It still has room for improvement such as accessing the microphone for Android remote access. Because of this, using it on an Android device may not be the best choice.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

In terms of the valuable features, I like the profile, the new version is really good.

The DB card needs improvement. I have a lot of experience with other competitors and Citrix is better than VMware and Microsoft. Citrix has more extensive features. 

I have been using this solution since 2003.

I haven't had to reach out to support. 

The pricing is fair. Our customers are satisfied. 

I would rate Microsoft Remote Desktop Services a seven out of ten. 

In the next release, there should be one management console to manage all of the servers and rules. That would be a good improvement. 

It also needs a better tool for monitoring. We need to test the user experience. 

We are a solution provider and this is a product that we implement for our customers.

We use Microsoft RDS in conjunction with VMware for desktop virtualization.

The most valuable features are the desktop session and desktop virtualization.

My customers are worried that the RDP protocol can be easily compromised and would like the option to use an alternative like Blast. The details of RDP are available to everyone and it has been used in industry for many years, so people know what points are vulnerable. If there were a patented protocol available as an option then people would be happy because they will be more assured of the security. Tweaking this would be really good in terms of security.

I have been working with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services for between five and six years.

Microsoft RDS is reliable.

It is really easy to scale-up or scale-out. Just add one, two, or three cells and it works. It's really straightforward.

I have never been in contact with Microsoft technical support.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and I haven't had any issues in the past three years.

The solution has a perpetual license and it is purchased upfront.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is that it is really easy to set up and it can be deployed in an urgent manner, depending on the environment. If you need remote access and do not have the expertise, yet it is an emergency situation, then this could be a great product.

If you're looking for a good end-user experience and you're concerned about all of the features, then Microsoft does not have all that VMware does. It can do almost everything, but there are some features that it does not support.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

This is our primary tool for monitoring our services.

The most valuable feature is that it gives me full accessibility to my servers.

It is easy to configure.

Security in the connection between us and our clients' servers is something that can be improved.

We have been using Remote Desktop Services for about ten years.

This solution is extremely stable and we use it on a daily basis.

In my office, we have about ten people who are using Microsoft RDS.

We have not contacted Microsoft support for help with this product.

The initial setup is quite easy. 

We use a VPN between sites to provide our own security.

Overall, it is an excellent tool that works great and I would recommend it. The most important thing is to update and improve the security protocols.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using Cisco AnyConnect to create a VPN that Microsoft Remote Desktop Services uses to connect to and control a remote computer. 

The most valuable features are availability and security.

We are searching for a product with better remote access and remote sessions.

The user experience needs improvement.

We are only using Microsoft RDS on a temporary basis for people to work remotely during the COVID-19 crisis.

The scalability is limited to small and medium-sized organizations.

The technical support from Microsoft is very good.

Remote work is getting bigger and bigger and we are searching for a new solution that is more secure and provides more remote access features.

This is a good solution but Microsoft is not number one in the market for VDI. I would recommend it for a small to medium-sized business, but not for an enterprise-level company.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use Remote Desktop Services for a few things. My experience started with Microsoft Remote Desktop when I tried to reuse really low power desktop machines to turn them from these desktop machines into class remote desktop terminals. That is my initial experience with Microsoft Remote Desktop. My most current experience with Microsoft Remote Desktop is using a specific Microsoft product on the servers where you don't have any chance to administer them using the web browser. SCCM, active directory administration and other Wintel server roles are most handy and the most secure to administer from the Microsoft Management Console. Therefore, you need to do it at least from some instance of the Microsoft windows server.

I like that it works. In most cases, it's predictable. You know what you get.

Microsoft still has some really bad remote desktop appliances for Mac. This is really frustrating because if I'm on windows I can remove the Microsoft remote desktop applied for Windows, but I'm already using windows, I always have an option B. I can still plug directly with Microsoft management console from the windows station and still do something remotely. But on a Mac, I have to rely purely on the Microsoft Remote Desktop. 

If I need to pass second-factor authentication, not a one-time password thing, if I do a Microsoft remote desktop session, I have to reach the first server, which is my best one. From that server, you're actually going inside your protective network. Then on the second spot, you are not able to pass a YubiKey and go any farther. That creates the problem. We have had many support tickets.

With this new company, I have been using this solution for two and a half years, but overall I have 15 years of experience.

It is being used mainly on a Mac platform.

I would say it's stable.

In the last setup, we had 3,000 users. It wasn't the nicest experience.

My experience with support is varied. It really depends. It varies depending on which support line you get. If you say you're a particular engineer then they won't really bother to support you. But if you say you have an enterprise contract and that you're a big company and you have a contract then they offer better support.

We previously used Citrix. Microsoft Remote Desktop Services is a more developed version of Citrix.

I would recommend going for VMware.

Microsoft programs are never easy to install but the installation wasn't something we didn't expect.

We deployed it on our own.

We use enterprise orchestration so it doesn't take too long to deploy. Microsoft products do not really play along with the open-source orchestration platforms. Once you overcome this, it becomes easier.

I would not recommend going with this solution because I wouldn't recommend going for a big enterprise setup. 

I would rate it a four out of ten. 

In the next release, they should develop better support for remote desktops for alternative platforms. It's really lacking consistency. If I have to support terminal server clusters and I have to do change management on the big cluster, then I actually run into a lot of issues both on the Microsoft Remote Desktop as well as Citrix. They should provide a consistent user experience. It's a pain to roll out changes into a different mode of the cluster and to propagate them over multiple modes. I end up in a situation where a portion of my users get the changes and the other portion doesn't.

The primary use case of this solution is to improve mobility and to access current sessions from different locations.

Reliability is a key feature for us.

The ease of use, as well as ease of integration within our security framework, are valuable.

We need to extend over a potentially slower network, and we have heard that performance over slower networks is not as good. I understand that there are other products out there that work better over slower networks.

In the next release, I would like to see better performance over slower networks, and integration with Linux, but this is something that we're going to get out of Microsoft in terms of a unified solution. It rolls out to bigger issues and access management with being unified with Microsoft and Linux.

This hasn't quite come together, I would have to get other products outside of Windows to get this to work.

The unified solution may be a cross-platform solution, which would be great in the future.

I have been using this solution for six years.

We are running a remote desktop from our workstations, not from our servers, and we are running an old Windows 7 version that is just about to be retired.

This solution is stable, I am not aware of any outstanding issues.

In terms of how we use it in our environment, it's not an issue for us, this solution is scalable.

We have approximately 50 users, who are mostly consultants. We are a small consultancy organization, and we are mostly IT.

I have not contacted technical support directly and I know the team doesn't have any issues with this. Usually, we get a reasonably good turn around time. Not against remote desktop, I don't believe that we have had support for that.

In general with Microsoft, it's been good.

Previously we experimented with other products, but for the moment we are staying with Microsoft remote desktops.

There are other products that we are looking for. At the moment we have four different platforms, and maybe having a unified solution might be the key reason to change in the future. We need a cross-platform solution. We have to have remote access, for example, on Linux Solutions as well, and we don't want to be running on different clients.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It's almost an out-of-the-box function once you have installed the other components.

Once you have set up your workstations and your servers, it's not a big deal to switch on and enable and integrate with Active Directory or remote logins. 

In terms of testing, it took half a day to a day's work to ensure that it was working.

We implemented this solution with our in-house team.

Retrospectively, no, we selected Microsoft and used it.

We are doing some research at the moment to see what we will do in the future for our next generation of infrastructure and renewal.

It's a good solution, and especially if you already have Microsoft running then it's probably one of the better solutions to choose from.

I am not sure whether it's the best future cross-platform solution when we are running multiple workstation environments with different platforms.

I am really happy with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services in our current environment. We have no issues at the moment.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for remote desktop services.

We find the services are not as transparent as we would like for our integration with Citrix.

Stability is quite good.

We currently have 300 users. We do not have any current plans to increase the usage. It is scalable for our needs.

The initial setup was straightforward. The deployment took only two hours. We did it all in-house.

The pricing is moderate.