Microsoft Remote Desktop Session Host servers deployment with BIG-IP LTM.

Hello everyone,

We configured BIG-IP LTM for RDS. We followed the deployment guide - https://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/microsoft-rds-session-host-dg.pdf. We are using only LTM. No AFM and no APM. Our idea is to front end the RDS with F5 VIP (public IP), so all the RDS traffic goes through the BIG-IP traffic. MS RDS 2016 running on Win server 2016. Little background on F5 config - We have session host servers behind BIG-IP and our pool contains all the session host servers, we are using MSRDP persistence profile as per the deployment guide and we are using a SNAT IP.

The solution we deployed is working. However, the traffic is not flowing as expected. Clients use a DNS name and it resolves to our VIP. BIG-IP selects session host and sends traffic to it. After this initial flow of traffic (client---->F5 VIP---->Session host server), we see the client is communication directly with the session host server (Client ---->Session host), but not through the BIG-IP device. It looks like something is redirecting the client to the session host server. We reached out to F5 support, they reviewed my config and confirmed that BIG-IP is not performing redirects. Microsoft team is alo investigating. Do anyone have an idea of what's going on?

Thanks