Highly Available deployment and availability pattern for heritage Windows applications on AWS

14th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Quite often I am presented with the challenge of deploying Windows COTS applications onto the AWS platform with a need to requirement for taking advantage of cloud native patterns like auto-scaling and auto-healing. In this blog post I’m going to describe how I’ve used Auto Scaling Groups, Load Balancers, Cloudwatch Alarms and Route 53 to provide a self healing implementation for a heritage COTS Windows application. This pattern was also extended to use lifecycle hooks to support a Blue/Green deployment with zero downtime.… [Keep reading] “Highly Available deployment and availability pattern for heritage Windows applications on AWS”

Remote desktop client randomly unable connect to the RDS farm

15th of April, 2014 / / 5 Comments

Recently I ran into a problem with an existing Remote Desktop Services 2012 R2 at a client site. The error occurred intermittently and after a number of retries, client could establish connection normally making the issue not always reproducible.  This blog summarises the process of identifying the symptoms, possible causes, and the resolution steps.

Some Background

The RDS farm consisted of two connection broker servers and two session hosts.  The Remote Desktop Connection Broker is configured in HA mode using two DNS records pointing to two broker nodes for round robin. … [Keep reading] “Remote desktop client randomly unable connect to the RDS farm”