Terminal Services Gateway and Terminal Services Web Access using Hyper-V (Part 4)

Part four of my weekend project is to add the Hyper-V management applications to Terminal Server web access. Let’s see just how easy that is. Of course, I could have left it at the point of “TS’ing” to the Hyper-V machine directly like in the screenshot below, but we’re so close to having the management applications remoted, let's finish it off.

fulltstohyperv

The first thing I need to do is to make the Hyper-V management applications available on the Terminal Server machine itself. Let’s go a small step further (after all, I’ll want to manage much more than just Hyper-V) and put all the management applications for Windows Server 2008 onto the Terminal Server machine.

Start up Server Manager, and select features. From here, click Add Features

feature1

Here I’m making sure all Remote Server Administration Tools are selected.

feature2

Just let the Add Features Wizard run through it’s stuff to the end and restart the machine when prompted. You’ll notice that the Administrative Tools menu now has a wealth of options including Hyper-V Manager.

admintools

Let’s startup the TS RemoteApp Manager application to start adding applications to the TS Web Access page. You’ll notice the messages saying that there are currently no remote applications configured.

remoteapp1 
Click Add RemoteApp Programs from the Actions pane on the far right, and the RemoteApp Wizard starts. When you get to “Choose programs to add to the RemoteApp Programs list”, you’ll notice that the Hyper-V Manager application isn’t listed. We can just browse to virtmgmt.msc which (in Hyper-V Beta) is located under %Program Files%\Hyper-V\virtmgmt.msc. Note that you have to change the file filter on the browse dialog to “All Files” as by default, only executables are shown.

remoteapp2

Simply click through to the end of the wizard, and that’s pretty much it.

remoteapp3

Now I’ll log back on to the TS Gateway and verify that Hyper-V Manager is now available as an application.

remoteapp4

Simply log on with appropriate credentials to connect to your Hyper-V machine, and it “just works”. The following screenshot was a little difficult to capture, as I was trying to show you that the Hyper-V Manager really is running remotely on a Vista SP1 machine - notice a few sidebar applications open. You’ll have to take my word for it, I really am not running any Hyper-V components locally (in fact, they’re not available in the Hyper-V Beta anyway, apart from on Windows Server 2008). Of course, you can open VM settings, connect to the interactive console using Virtual Machine Connection and so forth as you can see. Least surprising is that it’s cold and raining in Seattle - absolutely nothing out of the ordinary there for this time of year!

remoteapp6

So in summary, it’s pretty straightforward to bring up a 64-bit  Windows Server 2008 virtual machine under Hyper-V, configure it with Terminal Services and expose both direct RDP and TS Web Access securely onto the Internet through ISA Server 2006.

Hope this helps someone!

Cheers,
John.