Fixed-price health check

Find out what your RDS estate needs before you decide its future

Connection Broker, Session Hosts, Gateway, Web Access, licensing, profiles and load balancing, reviewed as one estate. You get an executive summary to take to budget approval, the technical findings with their root causes, and a rectification path in the order we would do it.

Request an RDS health check

Fixed priceA 3-day or a 5-day review. The extra two days buy wider coverage and depth: more sites, and deeper profile and performance analysis

Who books this

Everything about the RDS estate lives in one person's head, and you want it checked and written down
Users hit the same session issues every day: blocks, reconnections, shortcuts that do not launch, a slow new Outlook
Your session hosts run Windows Server 2016, which leaves support on 12 January 2027
You are moving from VMware to Hyper-V and the RDS estate has to come with you
You need to decide whether to stabilise RDS or move to Windows Server 2025, AVD or Windows 365, and want that decided on evidence

What you get

An executive summary written for budget approval: where the estate stands, what it puts at risk, and what fixing it involves
A technical findings report with root causes, covering Connection Broker, Session Hosts, Gateway, Web Access, licensing, user profiles (UPD or FSLogix), load balancing, patching and OS support
A rectification path, in the order we recommend doing it
A straight answer on stabilising RDS against moving to Windows Server 2025, AVD or Windows 365
The option of a support wrap afterwards, if you want help keeping it right. It is not a condition of the review

What we need from you

Access to the RDS servers and the infrastructure around them for the review, arranged to suit your change process
Someone who knows the estate for a short kick-off, and for questions as they come up
The problems users report today, however informal, so we look where it hurts first
Your supplier security due-diligence questionnaire, if your procurement needs one. We will complete it before the work starts

When not to book this

If you have already decided to move to AVD or Windows 365 and the RDS estate only has to survive until then, a full health check is more than you need. Book the virtual desktop review instead, which sizes where you are going rather than the estate you are leaving.

Other assessments

Microsoft estate review: Forty-five minutes and a written summary. What you are licensed for, what is switched on, where the gaps are, and what we would fix first.
Security posture review: Most of what we find is not missing products. It is features you already pay for that were never switched on. Forty-five minutes to find out which.
Cloud cost review: Non-production running around the clock, orphaned resources nobody decommissioned, and licences still assigned to leavers. Forty-five minutes to quantify yours.
Cyber Essentials readiness check: The five control themes, checked against what you actually run. Most first-time failures are the same handful of things, and all of them are cheaper to fix before you apply.
Application compatibility assessment: Migrations do not stall on operating systems, they stall on a handful of applications nobody can account for. This sorts your estate into the four groups that actually matter, before you commit budget to any of it.
Virtual desktop review: Whether you are choosing between Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 or already running one and paying more than you expected, this is the same review: what the estate is doing, what it costs, and what it should cost.
Copilot readiness check: Copilot does not grant anyone a single permission they did not already have. It just makes what they already had very easy to find, which is why the permissions work belongs before the licences and not after.
Backup and recovery review: Everyone has a backup. Far fewer have a restore. The question worth answering is not whether jobs are running, it is when somebody last proved one and how long the business would be down.
Application and reporting discovery: Most bespoke software goes wrong at scoping rather than in the build, and the most valuable thing a first conversation can do is establish whether you should be commissioning software at all.
Endpoint and Intune review: Not whether Intune says the estate is compliant, but whether that means what you think it means: what is enrolled, what has gone quiet, which policies are actually winning, and what you could prove if somebody asked.
DfE digital standards baseline: Sixty minutes against all twelve DfE digital and technology standards, the six core ones first. You get a governor-ready summary of where you stand and a dated plan for each gap, whether or not anything else follows.
Kemp LoadMaster health check: Load balancers are the classic forgotten appliance. We review your LoadMaster's configuration backup and logs offline, so nothing connects to or changes the appliance, and you get a written report on its health with the evidence behind every finding.

Not ready to give us access to anything? See what a client gets each month instead, in twenty minutes with nothing needed from you.

Or read first: Remote Desktop Services · Windows Server 2016 end of support · Already moving? The AVD and Windows 365 review · AVD consultancy