This post is written in August 2022 – and may or may not current by the time you read this!

Recently i was was refreshing a larg-ish RDP farm to newer OS’s/version ready for an upgrade of the core business application.

As part of this, new Server 2019-based RD Brokers were to be setup – and setting up the HA proved to be more challenging than it has been in the past.

And before you say it – the vendor of the business application presented by RDS doesn’t support AVD/WVD – so “just put it in the cloud” is not an option.

Most of the articles around the web talk about using the SQL native client – which is now deprecated. Then in turn, recommends the OLE DB Driver for SQL.

Trying to use the OLE DB driver resulted in may lost hours for myself, the clients best tech and their SQL guru.

The most current MS document that we could find, talks about using ODBC 13 – which according to these tables, is not supported on anything above SQL 2017 and Windows Server 2012…. so not exactly current.

Following a few links – we can see that the current ODBC driver version (at time of writing) is 18.1.1.1 – available from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/connect/odbc/download-odbc-driver-for-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver16  which supports current OS’s and SQL versions.

Our findings were:

1. We could not get the OLE DB driver to work… we suspect it was due to to security issues – but do not know for sure – as the HA setup for RDCB does not appear to have any verbose logs that i could find.
2. The ODBC driver v13 worked fine with a connection string of DRIVER={ODBC Driver 13 for SQL Server};SERVER=tcp:server.com.au,1433;APP=Remote Desktop Services Connection Broker;Trusted_Connection=Yes;Database=RDFarm;Encrypt=yes;TrustServerCertificate=yes;Connection Timeout=30 – however, given that ODBC driver v13 was not supported on the platforms we were deploying with (Server 2019 and SQL 2019) – this made us uncomfortable
3. The ODBC driver v18 worked fine with a connection string of DRIVER={ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server};SERVER=tcp:server.com.au,1433;APP=Remote Desktop Services Connection Broker;Trusted_Connection=Yes;Database=RDFarm;Encrypt=yes;TrustServerCertificate=yes;Connection Timeout=30 – This version of the driver has current version OS and SQL support – but was not mentioned in the RDP broker article. Some of you may be saying “so what”…. and the reality is when you have many thousands of users reliant on a core business app 24×7 – little things like that become important. Its incredibly difficult these days to get onto someone within MS support that even knows what your talking about – so saying you have deviated from an official document only makes things even more difficult.
4. I have lodged a request for modification/clarification to the official doc here – and we’ll see what happens with that.