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Fravocado_30155's avatar
Fravocado_30155
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Dec 02, 2016
Solved

APM as an RDP Proxy but still get to RD Web Access page?

Hello,   I am currently trying to understand if deploying the F5 with Microsoft Remote Desktop Gateway servers will fit our needs. I am not sure if using the APM to proxy remote connections will ...
application delivery
BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)
http proxy
iApps
rds 2012
remote desktop gateway
  • Lucas_Thompson_'s avatar
    Lucas_Thompson_
    Dec 06, 2016

    In v13.0, APM can read items from a RemoteApp feed and SSO + proxy them to your APM users in an APM webtop. This would be quite difficult to implement on prior versions, so I’d recommend you wait for that release. v13.0 is going to be released within a few months.

     

    This new version can publish RemoteApps (app virtualization) and also publish native RDP Resources (desktop virtualization) to IOS, Android, Mac, and Windows using the native Microsoft client. This requires installation of the Microsoft RD app.

     

    You can also request access to the beta program here on DevCentral if you'd like to test it out in a non production environment.

     

    Edit: the iOS part only works correctly in the case that you don't use RD Broker.

     

Lee_55137's avatar
Lee_55137
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This thread has been very helpful in getting us up and running in a sandbox environment. We've run into a dead end though in trying to apply this to our production environment.

In both environments we have separate boxes for APM and LTM, but we have only been using APM for now in both. The major difference between our two environments would be licensing: in sandbox we have APM running with a Lab license, and in production we have APM licensed with limited LTM licensing (no load balancing). Webtop is populating properly with all the Remote Apps but when opening the downloaded *.rdp files we get a fairly generic "Your computer can't connect to the remote computer because and error occurred". One thing we see different in the APM logs is it looks like even though we have a Kerberos SSO profile assigned to the Remote Desktop profile, we are only seeing NTLM attempts server-side. Both production and sandbox are using the default/unmodified "vdi" profile. We are seeing entries in APM logs like the following after launching *.rdp:

Apr 27 15:04:48 F5-APM-V2 err tmm[11517]: 019cffff:3: /Common/RDITAccessPolicy:Common:00000000: VDI profile on /Common/RDIT does not have associated NTLM Auth profile or ECA profile is missing
Apr 27 15:04:48 F5-APM-V2 debug tmm[11517]: 019cffff:7: /Common/RDITAccessPolicy:Common:00000000: RD: [C] XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX.53685 i XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX.443: server-side connection was reset, reason: iRule execution (reject command)

Has anyone else encountered this, or have any thoughts? Thanks!

Lucas_Thompson_'s avatar
Lucas_Thompson_
Historic F5 Account
Apr 28, 2017

This ECA error indicates that VDI is falling back from the protocol used by newer clients to the older protocol. The older one requires NTLM credentials from the client. How to set that up is documented here, it's somewhat different than the newer implementation:

 

https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_apm/manuals/product/apm-implementations-12-0-0/7.html

 

To make sure it uses the newer protocol, use a newer client. You're probably testing with Windows 7. Install this:

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2923545/update-for-rdp-8.1-is-available-for-windows-7-sp1

 

Windows 8.1, Mac (updated from the app store), or Windows 10 will contain the newer client.

 

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