Preparing for Server Maintenance

When you need to patch a terminal server or update an application, you certainly don’t want users to be connected to it at the time. Therefore, you’ll need some method of keeping users off the server when necessary. This is generally known as putting the terminal server into drain mode, where existing connections are allowed to continue but no new ones are allowed in (and the TS Session Broker won’t route any connections there).

When preparing for maintenance, there are three steps you should perform, in order:

  1. Disable new logons.

  2. Inform users of the planned downtime.

  3. Programmatically shut down the terminal server.

Disabling New Logons

You can put a server into drain mode via Terminal Services Configuration or the command ...

Get Windows Server® 2008 Terminal Services Resource Kit now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.