Installing Parallels RAS: Your first deployment

This second technical webinar in a series of four in which we basically will cover all the technical content of the RAS technical professional training. My name is Steven de Winter. I'm the Global Senior Director of Sales Engineering at Parallels and I'll be your host for this session. With me on the line is Paul Fisher. He's one of our senior sales engineers at Parallels. And if there would be like any questions or anything you want some clarification on during this webinar, please feel free to use the chat. We will try to answer as much as possible live during this webinar. We have for today, again, a packed agenda like last time. We're going mainly to do live installation today. So where the last webinar was mainly slides that I went through. This webinar will be mainly going through a full installation from scratch. So we will start with doing a basic installation. So we will start with installing Connection Broker Gateway and first session host, and then we will make everything redundant. So that's the second part of this webinar. And then once this environment is up and running, we will start publishing all kinds of applications and desktops. I'm also going to cover today how we integrate into MSIX App Attach and FSLogix. And then once these things are done, two more chapters for today's session. We're going to talk very briefly on, okay, how do you get these users now onto the platform, user onboarding? And then the last thing I'm going to cover today is the basic troubleshooting and how to get help. So with that said, as mentioned, packed agenda. So let's get started. Okay, so let's go into the installation. So I think, actually, before you start your installation, you need to do some thinking work and you need to figure some things out. And let's assume for today's webinar that these steps have been done. So I think before you start, four steps. First of all, you need to define your use cases. Are you going to publish apps or desktops? Are you going to publish both? Are you going to use things like RDSH backends? Or is it like individual Windows 10, 11, VDIs or ADD that you want to use? Same thing for High Available or Disaster Recovery. So how do you plan to make it High Available? Do you need Disaster Recovery? What is your minimum time that you can be offline? What are the steps that you need to take to make the environment ready for production? And then another thing, which is also important, and I'm going to show that in the next step, it's make sure that all your network and your firewalls are all configured. So I will show you where you can find that information straight away. And then, of course, something which is also already done for today's webinar is that my servers are deployed. So as explained during the previous webinar, everything runs on Windows servers, except the High Available load balancer with all the other servers or all the other roles run on Windows servers. So make sure that these machines are available and running on the latest patches. And also, very specifically, if you're using like antivirus, we have some recommendations when it comes to like antivirus exclusions that need to be checked. But let's assume that this work is all done. So how do you get started? So the first step is that you need to get sure that you get the software, and let me already switch live to a live environment. So if you want to get the software, what you need to do is you have to go into your MyParallels account. You need to log in. And then if you go here to download product files, product, and then you go here to remote application server, you can download the latest version of the Parallels Bus software. So if you would need for some reason, like an older version, you can still download them from here, but in general, this is like a new installation. Just recommend you to download the Parallels Bus software from here. This is a single executable that contains all the roles, or almost all the roles, only a few here. More advanced things like reporting and monitoring are separate components, but let's say all the basic roles are part of this executable. If you don't have a My Account portal yet, it's important to mention that I would not recommend at this point in time to, if you don't have an account, to say over here that I'm a new user and create a new account for the very simple reason that what you will do is you will create a consumer account and the Parallels Bus software requires a business account. So if you don't have an account yet on the system, there's another trick you can do. And that is, if you go to the Parallels Bus website and you go to the Try page, you will see that there is a button here which is like try, trial, do it yourself. If you click on this one and you follow these steps and you fill in the form and so on and so on, you will get the links to download the software without having a MyParallels account. And then you will see in the next step when we install the software that there's also a possibility to create an account later on. And if you create the account in the software, it's automatically an admin account. So this is, I think, something important to mention. So let's say I have my software, I have my account. So the first thing you need to do is, of course, then run the installer. So I have on this machine downloaded the executable. I think the latest version is 21.1 dot something and it's around 300 megabytes. So if you have the installer, you can start and start installing it. You have to accept the license terms, click on next. This is something which is part of what we call the Parallels Customer Experience Program. So you can disable it, you can afterwards also still enable it if you need. This helps the Parallels product team with discovering which features and functionality that are enabled on your site. And that also helps us like further enhancing the product so that we know which things are used and which things are not used. To be very clear, we've never sent any customer-identifiable information over its pure statistics and if certain features are used or not used. It's not like, for example, Steve logged in or these are the published applications. So it's only pure statistical data that is sent. So if you want to help further developing the product or software, something that would be nice, it asks where to install it. So just going to keep the standard one. And I think that the most important part is this page. So if you just plan to install a connection broker and a gateway, then you can just click here on the standard one. The standard one will install the gateway, the connection broker, the PowerShell modules and the console and the web console. What I'm going to do is I'm going to deploy directly also a session host. So if I go here to custom, I can also click the session host, which is already over here. So I'm installing the connection broker, the session host and the secure gateway, the console, PowerShell and the administrative service. So these are like the things I want to have on this first machine, which is called my lab 41. I'm sorry, my lab 43. So if I click on next, it will ask me if it's okay to automatically configure all the firewall ports. I'm going to show you the firewall ports in one minute. And then basically just going to warn me that there's going to be a website running, which will run on port 81 and that all connections on port 80 will be redirected to the port 81 website. Besides that, if I click on next, the last question, this has nothing to do with single sign-on into RAS. So we already have done an advanced webinar on SAML-based single sign-on into RAS. This has nothing to do with that part of single sign-on. It has to do with like, if you log into your client, are you okay to do like automatic login to the Parallels RAS client based on your login into the client? So I don't, I'm not going to install it at this time. And then if I click on install, the installer will start. This will take, yes, so this will take a few minutes. I'm not going to wait until it finishes. I already have another machine, which is already like one step further. We can go back to lab 43 later on, but basically this one is already like one step further. The installer has finished. I've done like a reboot to activate everything. So the first time you will log into the system, you have to start either the management console or the web console. I'm running the console over here. You have to log in with an administrative account. So you have to log in with, for example, a domain admin or a user which has administrative privileges onto this machine. So my stable account has this. And what you will see is that the first time I log in to the environment, it's not yet licensed. So it tells me like, hey, this environment is not yet licensed. You have to provide your licenses. So let me quickly demonstrate how that works. So let me copy my password from my account just to get into my password manager. Let's do it this way, it's going to be faster. So let me just copy it over here. Let's do it a second time. Sorry for that. So let me copy my password, okay. So if I go back here and I log in with my password, what you will see is that I have like two options. I can go into my license manager and pick an existing license or copy it in here, or I can choose this one, activate the trial version and then click on activate and it will automatically activate the system with a temp license. The temp license or the trial license is fully functional. So there are no limitations except two. So the first limitation is of course the time. It's a 30 day trial license. And the second limitation is that it's only for 50 compared users. But besides that, everything is going to be fully functional. Let me switch back to this machine to continue the installation. So if everything has gone fine, I've run the installer. I have licensed my environment. I have logged in the first time. What you will see is that you have, in my case, I have the session host on my first box, I have the gateway on my second, also on my first box and I have the connection group for the primary machine on my first machine. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to, first of all, install a second session host just to show you how that one works and also to show you how the integration into FSLogic works. So with everything in Rust, if you want to install something additional, it's always the same thing. You go to the component that you want to install and you click here on the plus sign and then you can go through the install wizard. So I want to install like an extra host. So I'm going to pick it from Active Directory. So this is my machine I want to use. It's the Log42 machine. Going to click on next. It's going to ask me if it's okay to install the firewall rules, the RBS role, to enable the desktop experience role if required and it's going to ask you if it's okay to reboot if needed. So I'm going to say that that's all fine. I'm going to create a new host pool. So as explained in the previous session, a host pool is like a group of session hosts and a session host can only be part of one group. So let's call this, for example, my app pool. Create a new one, click on plus and I'm going to put this new host into the app pool. Click on next. Which users are allowed to log into this machine? So I'm going to add all my lab users to this host pool. So my lab users are allowed to log into this machine. And this is the part that I wanted to show you. So this is the part where we can configure the user profile. So this is a blank setup. So it says like inherit the default settings and the default settings are like do not manage by RAS but I'm going to overrule them. So I'm going to remove the default settings and I'm going to specify that I want to use FSLogix. FSLogix can be, first of all, installed by RAS. So there are several ways we can install it. You can, of course, install it manually and for example, already do that or put it in your image. What I'm going to do is like, I'm going to go for the install online option. So I'm going to specify that RAS can download it directly from Microsoft, the latest version and install it from there. The other options is that you can install it from a network share or you can push it from the connection group which I'm not going to do in this case. Just to install it online. And I'm also going to use both the user profile containers and also the office containers. Something for those of you who are like used to work with FSLogix is that normally if you want to do this, you have to create like a sort of XML file and you have to start configuring everything through your GPOs. That's all not needed. So you can do all the configuration from in here. So the first thing I'm going to do is specify where my profiles need to be stored. So I have a folder here, which is called profiles and I'm going to store my profiles in here. And then I'm going to do the same thing for my office container profiles. I'm going to specify that these can be stored in the other folder. So go here, profiles, office. Okay. And we can specify all the details in here. So I can, for example, enable all the flags, all the features, all the settings can be set. So there's absolutely no reason anymore to manage anything outside of Rust when it comes to FSLogix. Same thing with, for example, things like cleanup invalid sessions or roaming of the recycle bin, or for example, enabling the cache settings. I'm not going to change them right now, but all these settings can be configured all from in Parallels. If I click on next, the next step, and this is also like something super interesting. The next step will ask me if Parallels is allowed to optimize this session host for RDSH. So this is a bunch of, I think, close to 200 settings that will be applied onto this image to really optimize it for remote access. There's also a possibility to add custom scripts if needed, or if you click on manual, you can, for example, edit them. So if I, for example, go to registry, you will, for example, see that I can customize this one if needed or make changes. I'm just going to leave everything on the default for now. And then I'm finished. So if I click on next, what will happen is, so the connection host, so lock 41 will now connect to lock 42 with my admin account statement. It's going to push the agent. It's going to install all the roles, all the sessions, everything, so this is going to take a few minutes to finish, but as soon as this is finished, the installer will start, which is going on right now, and then once that installer is done, it should be ready, and I think it might also do a reboot. I'm not 100% sure if it still would be needed in this case, but typically, it would require a reboot. It's finished. If I click on done, finish, apply, and let's refresh. Okay, it doesn't require a reboot this time. It's because probably I already tested everything and I rebooted it. Normally, if you would do it like the first time, it would ask you to do a reboot of the server, but as you can see, I have now two session hosts. I have my lock 41 and my lock 42, which are available. I have two host pools. In my default pool, you will see that I have that lock 41, and then if I would go to my app pool, you have the lock 42 and 41. So this is how I can install multiple session hosts. If I want to install more, that can be done. This was like a manual install. There's also a possibility to install it via templates. That is something we will cover in the next webinar, so in the third webinar of this series, we're going to discuss things like templates, clones, auto-scaling, all these kind of things, so that's something we will cover in the next webinar. The next thing I want to show you, so we have the session host now, which is published. The next thing I want to show you is how to make the connection broker and the secure gateways high available. So for now, I only have, as you can see, one primary connection broker and one secure gateway, and what I want to do is, for example, also on that lock 42, I also want to make that secondary connection broker and also a second secure gateway, and the principle is the same. I just go to, for example, YouTube connection broker, click on plus, it will ask me for which server, so I'm going to pick my second one, my lock 42, click on resolve, and everything is there, and again, we can do things very simple. It's going to ask me if it's okay to also install the gateway directly. It's going to ask me if it's okay to enable the HTML5 gateway, and it's also going to ask me if it's okay to include the firewall rules, so let's keep everything out of the box. So normally, it will say that it's not yet installed. Then you click on install. In my case, I've already installed it before just to save a little bit of time that we don't have to wait until things like reboots and things like that are finished, but it's now going to connect to that lock 42 server. It's going to configure everything, and then if you're a little bit patient, it should be available in a few seconds. We're doing the installation. Let me wait until it finishes. So it should be there any second now. So it's extracting, and then it should be there any minute. While I'm waiting for this, let me quickly check if there are any questions that came in. So there was a question on the previous session. Yes, the previous sessions are available on YouTube. I think my colleagues are sharing the links as we speak. So there's a question on FSLogix on the sizing. So if it would be, yeah, my colleague already replied. So if there are no limitations on the FSLogix sizing, it's basically the Microsoft, so the same limitations on the Microsoft side apply as on the rest. So it's finished, so let's check it out. So I have my two gateways up and running. You can see that they're already okay. And then my connection broker is also now okay. So as you can see, two gateways, a connection broker as primary and a secondary one, and then two session hosts. So we already have, we are 20 minutes into the webinar, and we already have like a full high available setup where we have over two hosts, two connection brokers, two session hosts, and two gateways. What I still need to do is configure, for example, the auto promotion. So as explained in the previous webinar, some roles are done only by the primary connection broker. Like for example, the licensing is done for the primary connection broker. There is a 72 hour grace period. Let's say that your primary connection broker would be gone for a longer time than 72 hours. Then you would need to promote the secondary one to the primary one. And that's a very simple operation. You can click here on promote to primary. So that's pretty simple to do. The other way that it could be done is over here. You could go here to auto promotion. And then you could, for example, say that the system automatically needs to be promoted after 30 minutes of an availability of the primary one that the secondary would become automatically primary. And then there's also like a flag to the full back. So it's very simple to configure these things. Also note that I didn't need any SQL server for doing the installation of the configuration. So also as explained previously, the configuration is stored on the connection brokers. And then every time you click on apply, there is a sort of mechanism that will replicate the settings from one system. So let's go back to the slides for one second. And then let's continue from there. So I've explained how to download the software. I've explained how to run the installer. I've explained how to license an environment. I think the only thing I forgot to mention is that where I typed in my existing account, I've mentioned that if you don't have an account, that there is a way to create directly a business account. This was on this tab. So if you click here on register, it will allow you to create like a new account and that account will directly be a business account which you would need for Parallels. We've created a new host pool. We added the host in the host pool. We set up FSLogix. We enabled the image optimization. So that was all done. Then we have installed the secondary connection broker. We have installed the secondary gateway at the same time and we have configured the auto promotion. So that's part is done. So let's move to publishing some resources. And what I would like to do now is I would like to do five things. So first of all, I would like to publish a full desktop. Then I would like to publish some individual applications. I also want to show you the local application feature. I also want to show you how the MSX app attach functionality works in Rust. And then the last thing I want to do is show you how these filters work. So I'm going to show you, for example, how you can make certain applications or desktops only visible for certain users or for certain other ways to filter. So that's the next part of the demos I want to do. All the publishing is done from in here. So if you go to publish, as you can see, it's currently empty. It's always the same principle. You click on add and then it's asking me what I want to publish. So let's, for example, start with publishing a desktop. It's going to ask me which kind of desktop we want to publish. So I only have the possibility to publish desktops from those session hosts. So that's an Rd session host based desktop. I want to publish it, for example, from my default pool. Click on next. I have to give it a name. So let's call it desktop. What I would like to do is, for example, automatically take the available screen size and then click on next. I'm going to enable it. So that means that it's directly available and I'm going to click on finish and on apply. So basically it's this easy. So let's test it out. So if I go to lab41.parallelsrass.net and I log in with users, let me take, for example, this one. I'm going to get my password. Watch my camera for my screen. Okay, so if I sign in, you see I have the desktop and then I can open it either in the browser or through the Parallels RAS client. Let me just, for example, open this one in the browser and if everything goes well, you see my lab13 user logs in and I have my desktop available. So pretty simple and it's there. Let me log out again. So this is how we can publish full desktops in RAS. If you go back and we want to do the same thing with individual applications, it works more or less the same way. I can click on add. I want to publish this time an application. First of all, from where? I want to publish it from a session host this time. Click on next. I would like to publish, for example, an application which is already installed. So I go for the installed applications, click on next. Let's take it, for example, from my Apple this time. Click on next. And as you can see, it now makes a scan of all the installed software on the machine. So let's install the usual suspects and let's install the calculator, notepad and paint. And what I also would like to install, for example, is my Parallels Remote Application Server console. Let's do this. So if I click on next, enable, next, next, finish, apply. If I now go back here to my client and I refresh my applications. And for example, if I want to run paint with Parallels RAS client, I can just click paint with Parallels RAS client. And then if everything goes well, it should open my client. There it is. And then in a few seconds, I should have my paint on my screen. There it is. So as you can see, I have paint running from my, via my client, from my published environment. So let's close this one, exit. No, don't want to see my picture. So very simple publishing desktop, publishing applications, just a few clicks. Before I show you how the MSX app attach and the local applications works, let me first demonstrate the filters. So for example, something I can do is I can click on, for example, calculator, and then I can go here to filtering. And the default filter says like, allow if no other rules matches. So the way it works, the filters is like, you have a bunch of filters. And the first filter that matches will apply. And then at the end, there is like a sort of default one, which is in this case like, allow if no other rules match. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, for example, that this is only for user lab 11, for example, and I'm logged in with lab 13, if I remember well. So what I'm going to do is here, allow if user group is not everyone, but for example, lab 11, check names, okay, okay, okay. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the default rules. So I'm going to say, for example, like, deny if no other rules match. So if I click on apply, what's going to happen? If I go back to this one, if I refresh, my calculator should be gone because I'm logged in with lab 11. So if I do refresh, you see it's gone. But these filters are very powerful. So let's do another example. What I also could do, for example, here on the notepad, is I could create another filter here. And for example, say like, allow if, for example, my client operating system is, for example, Windows. If I do this, and click on those, and then do the opposite here, apply. If I go back here and refresh, you see it's gone because I'm connected through my web client. If I would use my native client, let's see if that one works, connect. No, I'm on the wrong system. I should have connected on this one. So as you can see over here, I still have everything. I think I just connected. Let me quickly refresh because I think I was already logged in from before. But as you can see, the notepad is still visible because this is my Windows machine. The calculator is gone because I'm logged in with user 13 also on this one. And then the two other applications are always visible. So these filters are very powerful and can be used for a lot of things. Let me show you all the options. But we can filter on users or groups, gateways. Gateways could be interesting if you have like multiple ones. You could, for example, have like an internal gateway that is used only for internal traffic and then a public gateway for public traffic. You could use that. Teams is something we will cover in the next session, but we could also have, for example, filters based on Teams. And we could also do it on client device name. I could click on known devices and then I could pick my machine that can connect to this environment. So that's another way to filter. IP addresses, hardware IDs. So there is a lot of things we can use to create these filters. And you can also have like multiple filters for published applications. Let's publish some more things. So let me demonstrate how these local applications work. So if I go to application and click on next, this is a remote application, but you can also publish a local application on the local device. It's not really publishing that we're going to do, but what we're going to do is we're going to specify that if somebody clicks on this icon and the application can be found. So what I want to do is on this environment I'm going to publish Excel. So let me go back here. Let's say I want to publish Excel and Excel is in this folder. So if it can find Excel in this folder, then run Excel. And if it cannot be found, for example, or because you're running it from maybe a MacBook or something else, then we're going to fall back to this URL. And maybe also important to mention is that this local application currently only works with the Windows client. So just to demonstrate, so if I would do here a refresh, of course it will be visible. And if I would click on it, it will automatically open the native client and in my case, let me do it first of all, refresh. So it's here. So if I click on Excel, it will open my local Excel because it's installed. You see it's not a problem. Let me close it again. Let me slightly change it. So let me make a small change to it just to show you what happens if it cannot be found. So let's say, for example, the binary is Excel 2. Click on Apply. Let's go back to my client. Let's refresh. So in this case, it will not find Excel 2 on my machine. So what will happen now is instead of, yeah, because it didn't find the Excel 2 binary, it's going to open the web version of Excel and then I can select my account. And for example, so this is, for example, how we can mix, for example, managed devices and unmanaged devices. And if you're working from a managed device, we could, for example, say like start the application on the device. If it's an unmanaged device, then for example, say go to that URL or you could even make a link to the published version of Excel on the Rust to get it started. As mentioned today, it's only, this feature currently only works on the Windows client. All the other clients will automatically start the web for backlink in the case of a local application. And the other kind of applications I also want to show you is the MSX ones. So for those of you who are not very familiar with MSX, it's a Microsoft standard for packaging. And it's also something which is like 100% supported inside Parallels Rust. So if I want to start using MSX packages in Rust, the first thing I need to do is activate the feature. So this is something you need to know, but you have to go here to the settings, application packages, and then you have to click here on enable application package feature. And what will happen then is that this thing will become visible and you will be able to add packages to your repository. I already have published Firefox before, but let me show you how it works. So I can go to my system and I have a bunch of MSX packages over here. So let's, for example, say that I want to have this home bank one also. So if I click on imports, it will be added to the library and then I can click on apply and I have now like two packages in my catalog. The next step I would need to do is go here to my session hosts and then I have to go to my host pools. And let's, for example, say that I want to publish these applications from my application pool. Then over here, you will see the application packages and then I don't want to have the default ones. I want to have like specific ones. So if I click on plus, it will show me all the packages which are known in this repository. So let's, for example, say that I want to have both Firefox and home bank available on this pool. So if I now click on okay and on apply, I will be able to publish these applications from this pool of servers. They are not yet published. They are just like made available to this pool and we can make like different applications available to the pool. So I could, for example, like on my default pool only have Firefox and then on my up pool, I could have Firefox and the home bank application. If I want to publish them now, I have to go back to publishing, click on add. Again, it's an application I want to publish. Which application do I want? It's an application from my session hubs, excuse me. Which application do I want to publish? It's an application package, so application package from my up pool. And you will automatically see all the binaries which are available. I also have my Firefox and my private browsing Firefox and then the maintenance one and then here my home bank app. So let's, for example, say that I want to have both the home bank and Firefox available. I just click them, next, next, next. Finish. Apply. And if I go back here to my clients and I do a refresh, you will see these applications are there and then if I click on Firefox, Parallels RAS will connect to that session host. The Firefox application will be, will automatically be app attached to the session host and then it will be published for this user. And as you can see, I can start using Firefox on this device for now. So very, very intuitive, very simple. Publishing local applications, app attaching applications, publishing full desktops, remote apps. It doesn't require a lot of expertise or knowledge with just a few clicks and of course making sure your resources are all configured well. It can be up and running in less than a half hour as you have seen with my demo. And let me go back to the slides and let's continue with the rest of the content I wanted to cover. So we have, I think, published everything we wanted to publish today. So the desktops, the apps, the local apps, the filters and the app attach. Yeah, for the EFS Logic Container, as mentioned, there are four ways to install it. Manual, automatic download from Microsoft, either from the broker or from a specific location. There is no need for GPOs or XML configuration. It can do everything. Both support for the profile and the office containers and there is also support for ChromeCache if that's what you want to do. The image optimization, a whole bunch of things that can be done. Here is, for example, a screenshot of the services that you can disable, which are by default on, but you can disable those to make the environment faster. But by default, the settings are, let's say the recommended Microsoft settings for optimizing an environment. And then we have done all the publishing. And so we have done the desktop publishing and the application publishing. We have played with the filters. It is also possible to create like a filter with multiple rules at the same time. So you could, for example, say like, if it's this group and they come via that gateway, then yes. If it's another group and they come via another gateway, then not. So you can really mix and match these filters in any direction. I think the most important part is that it goes like top-down and the first rule that matches that will happen. Then MSX App Attaché, that's a bit more stuff that can be done. So we have to activate it. Then we have to upload the packages into the package store. Then we have to assign them to specific host pools or VDIs. We don't have any VDIs at this point. That's something we will cover in the next webinar. But once we start using templates and tools, then we will publish a bunch of VDIs. But that's also technically possible to attach to VDIs or to AVD resources. We can basically publish it to anything. And then once that is done, as before, go to application packages and then publish from a pool where they are attached to and select the applications to publish. And then for the local applications, it's a two-step thing. You first specify where the Windows binary can be found. And then if there's no Windows binary to be found, what is the fallback URL to launch the application. I think all of this really shows the power of choice. So you can mix and match everything into a single environment. So for example, in this case, I have a bunch of things which runs on AVD. I have some other things that run locally on Hyper-V, for example, and then I have a bunch of applications that run on scale. So we can mix all these things together on the infrastructure side. And then on the client side, again, the end user will have a possibility to run all the applications for a single client, either being run locally on the device or on a cloud or on a hypervisor or in a data center automatically. So this is, again, a very nice story. Also, for example, we know that lots of customers and partners are currently migrating from one hypervisor to another. We can also help with that. So you could, for example, still have a bunch of things on your old hypervisor. You could be moving to a new hypervisor. The parallels and all that can be done fully transparent for your end user. So this is a real power of choice including these local applications. Two more things I want to cover in this webinar. First thing is how to onboard users. So of course, you can use your software distribution and deploy the client and make the client pre-configured. That is something we already have covered in one of these advanced webinars. So if you go to the advanced webinars, there is one on advanced architectures over there. I've also covered how, for example, you could use Intune or another software distribution to, for example, distribute the Parallels RAS client with pre-configured client settings, for example, on a shared device. So that's something which is already covered over there. There are two things I want to cover in this basic webinar. The first one is that it's possible to invite users via email. So you need to configure like an SMTP server that can be used to send out your email messages. But once that is done, you can just specify, for example, like a distribution list and then automatically send an email to a large group of users. They will have like a nice email. And then if you click on that link in that email, it will automatically make a connection to your Parallels RAS environment with all the correct settings. Like for example, if you want to use like a username and password to log in, or if it needs to be done through single sign-on or through a smart card, all these things can be pre-configured in that email. And other way to pre-configure things is via a DNS record. So let me open the knowledge-based article. So there's a knowledge-based article. This one, it's called the Email-Based Account Discovery. And the way it works is you have to create a TXT record. And that TXT record needs to be called underscore underscore TRLS client. And then you can specify like in the text fields, you can specify, for example, your primary connection with a port. Maybe you want to specify like a secondary connection. And you could also specify the connection mode and the authentication mode. So the connection mode could be, for example, that everything needs to be go over the gateway and encrypted. Or maybe you want to do that differently if you're internal in your network and you want to have like direct connections to your resources, then you can, for example, specify one. So you can configure all these settings. And what will happen is that if you open your client and you create like a new connection, and for example, say that I want to add like steven.deventra.parallels.com, there is already a TXT record for parallels.com. And you will, there is not one for this one. Let me see if I have one for this one. No, but if you would have a TXT record, apologies for this demo, but if you would have like a TXT record, then it would automatically be able to download all the settings automatically, automatically know to which machine it needs to configure and to connect your client. So next to like rolling out clients, be configured. We can also have some settings based on DNS or to go back to the slides and cover the last part of today's webinar. And the last part of today's webinar is about getting help. So as you have seen, everything went pretty smooth. Of course, there will be a point that you will need to have help. So let's go to a few things. So the first thing you need to know is log files. Log files could be interesting. Of course, for yourself, you want to do some troubleshooting, but also if you open a support ticket, support might ask for the log files. So on the client side, the log files, of course, depends on the client you're using. For example, the Windows client is stored in appdata2xclient-client-log.txt. Of course, if you're using the web client, those log files are not stored on your device, but these are stored on the server side. So if you're using the web client, then you have to go to the gateway. So it's stored on the HTML5 gateway. Then you have to go to program data, parallels-ras-logs-html5-gateway.log. That is where you will find the log files for the web client. For all the server components, there are separate log files in the program data parallels-ras-logs folder. So there is a log file for the connection broker for the gateway, for the agents, for the VDI, for maybe you're using the single sign-on enrollment server. So for each component, there's a separate log file. And also the log files are by default on standard, but it could be required that you have to increase them to extended or verbose for troubleshooting. So that is also something you can do from the parallels-ras console. So if you go to the environment, you can go here to the settings, and then you can, for example, change the logging, and you could, for example, change it from standard to verbose or to extended. It's important to know if you bring it to extended or verbose that the amount of log files could be very big. So we would, for example, recommend if you put it on verbose, to, for example, say, like I want to put it on verbose only for like one hour, and then after one hour, it will automatically fall back to standard. It's also possible from in here to download all the log files at once. So for example, if I want to download all the log files, this is something I can do from in here. If I click on download, it will download all my log files directly at once. Let's go back to the slides. So yeah, log files is one thing. The log level is also an important other thing you need to know. This is the famous viral network troubleshooting diagram. So if you go to the documentation, so this is part of the reference architecture documentation, or there is also a knowledge-based article on it that gives you all the ports and everything you need to know. So either you go to the Parallels documentation, and then you open the reference architecture, and then in the reference architecture, there is this schema with all the details, or you search for this knowledge-based article, and then you can also go, for example, to the secure gateway, and then you have all the details, like from the secure gateway to the, if it's a forwarding mode, then these are the ports which are needed. If it's to a desktop service, these are the ports that are needed. So you get all the details in here. Same thing, for example, for let's say the high available load balance in which ports need to be open. So all the details are available in here. This is something I would also recommend, like if something goes wrong, you have firewall ports or a common cause of issues, and you will also see that typically in the log files. Some other best practices. So keep RAS components away from critical infrastructure. What does it mean in human admin language? Don't install your gateway on a domain controller, for example, to mention something. Other important thing. Some of these components are pretty IO-intensive. So for example, in the fourth webinar, we're going to talk about reporting and performance monitoring. These are separate components that need to be installed. These will require some heavy load on the disk. So it might be interesting to not install these, for example, on your connection block or on your session host. This is a recommendation mainly for larger environment, but if you go to like 500,000, 2,000 user environments, then we would recommend that you install like an odd number of connection blockers. So maybe go to three. Main rationale is avoid split brains. If you only have two, and you have like somewhere in the network split, and like half of your infrastructure is on one side, the other half is on the other side, then what else RAS might have difficult to determine, like what is the active part? What is the part that is isolated? So for avoiding split brain, I would recommend having like an odd number of connection brokers. Same thing with your load balancers, configure them correct. We have documentation for a lot of things, like if you want to use them in combination with Azure or with some other tools, there is documentation available. Same thing for upgrades. If you need to upgrade your primary connection broker, that can be done. There is no problem. Your secondary connection broker will take over. If you want to update the gateway, that's also possible. If you have like two gateways, then the sessions will be redirected to the secondary connection broker. Of course, the client will see it, and the client will be like frozen for a few seconds, and then it will be like trying to reconnect, and then it will be reconnected automatically. But I think if you want to upgrade, make sure that you're prepared. We also covered upgrades in one of these advanced webinars already. And then another thing, which I think is pretty obvious, like avoid running Microsoft components onto the same infrastructure as Rust. If all of this still is not sufficient to get yourself out of problems, again, links to the documentation, to the knowledge-based articles, and then to myparallels.com. myparallels.com is where you can also create the support tickets. If you create a support ticket, please be specific. Our support is there to help you, but of course, they can only help you if they have the needed information. So if you create a ticket that says something like, hey, my Rust is broken, please help me. That's, of course, not very helpful. That will at least have a few mails going back and forth before you're really helped. So if you have a problem, make sure that you have a clear description of the issue, the stuff that you already have done to reproduce. Also, for example, if you have log files, send the log files, and then also all the relevant information that might be useful. For example, something like, hey, everything worked fine, but I've upgraded my VMware the day before. This is, for example, interesting information that helps you for pinpointing the problem. For example, or hey, I didn't change anything the past six months, it's currently broken. That's like indicating that it might be somewhere else than, for example, to a recent change that has been made. But this is, I think, everything I wanted to cover for today's webinar. Next webinar, we're going to talk about things like templates, clones, auto-scaling providers, Azure Virtual Desktop specific stuff. We're also going to touch things like backups, upgrades, how to create accounts, how to do delegation, segregation of duty. So we're going to cover these parts. I see we still have a few minutes. So while we have a few minutes, let me see if there are any questions that I can still answer that might not be answered yet. I think my colleague, I see that there are several questions on the chat, and I see that I think most of the ones have been answered by my colleague, Paul. Paul, are there any questions we need to cover right now that might be interesting for everyone to know? I see lots of questions on recordings from the previous session. There is a question on how many sites are supported in a farm. I don't think there is a hard limit on it. I've not heard anyone that hit a limit, so I think that should be unlimited. That was also not the right word, but I don't think that should be anything that could be like a blocking point. It's important to mention, but I think I did it in the initial one, that at least one site is needed for a farm. If you want to learn more about multi-site, that is also something we have covered in that advanced architecture webinar. Stephen, there's a couple of questions. One about where can we find the advanced webinars? You'd be best placed to- Yeah, they're on YouTube, I think. What we could do, I think we're going to send out a follow-up email on this webinar. I'm going to ask if it's not too late yet to add the links to these webinars. But if you go to the Parallels YouTube channel and you search for advanced technical webinars, I think they're pretty easy to find. Go ahead, Paul. Yeah, and there's just one, I'm just writing an answer to as well, about is it useful to have multiple halves in a farm? And the answer is obviously yes. Halves are active, passive, but it does make that role highly available. Correct, and that's a topic we're covering in the fourth webinar. So if you're interested to know how that one works, that's something we've got in the fourth webinar. If there are no other questions, we need to address specific in this one. I want to thank everyone for being, again, so massive present during the webinar for the interaction. And hopefully we see you in the next and third webinar in this series. Bye-bye, everyone.