Building a Hyper-V and Microsoft Based Virtual Environment with Virtual Hosts and Session Hosts

Hello all,

Recently I stood up a "VDI" environment using Microsoft Windows 2012 R2.  The environment was not very complex, it featured:

1 Server running as the web host, connection broker, and gateway (a VM).
1 Server running as the virtualization host (a physical box).

Then I wanted to add a Session Host.  The Virtualization host provides you with a way to host VMs in the VDI environment, allowing you to deploy desktops for users from templates.

The session host allows you to deploy applications that are installed on that host as virtual applications.  What it really does is like sharing an app on WebEx or in instant messenger, instead of displaying the whole desktop, you get a window that just displays the application.

However if you click around the Server Manger interface it is not very intuitive how you add a new session host.

My first attempt was:

I built a new VM and installed the session host service on it.  Then I added it to the host I was using to manage the environment.  However I still could not see it as part of the RDS farm.

Then I called Microsoft (because I did not want to mess around with it).  The answer turns out to be that I had to uninstall the role from the new VM and then from my connection broker where I was managing the environment I had to step through the process to install the RDS services again.

What I did was:

1. Click on Manage from server manager
2. Select Add Roles and Features
3. Move past the introduction screen
4. Select the option to install Remote Desktop Services
5. Select the standard install option
6. Now it gets to the Virtualization or Session option.  Since I had already installed the virtualization option that was grayed out.  So I picked session.
7. Then it walked me through picking the hosts again.  The connection broker, web host, etc were all grayed out, I was not able to make a selection until I got to the session host.  There I was able to pick my new server and I was able to install the role.
8. It did require a reboot of the new session host and once that was complete I was able to instantly create a new collection and toss applications out for users to access.

The process is painless but there is little documentation to take you through it.  Hopefully this helps anyone who finds themselves in the same spot I was.