Said It Here

How to manage on-premises servers without an Active Directory domain

Managing on-premises services and legacy RDS environments without Active Directory authentication often forces administrators to rely on standalone workgroups. Because user data and profiles are locked locally to specific terminal servers, moving users between machines becomes nearly impossible and creates significant operational chaos.

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

  1. 1
    Using a Windows workgroup for peer-to-peer configuration
  2. 2
    Maintaining an on-premises Active Directory connected via VPN
  3. 3
    Entra join or Entra DS
  4. 4
    Keeping users siloed to their specific standalone servers with local profiles
  5. 5
    Planning to redesign the environment using an RDS farm, brokers, and FSLogix profiles
  6. 6
    Considering cloud alternatives like Azure Virtual Desktop

In their words

Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.

r/sysadmin2 people · September 2026

“I recently started working in a logistics company as single IT Operations and inherited an RDS environment that is… pretty old-school.”source ↗

“Users are basically assigned to specific terminal servers and keep logging into “their” server every day.”source ↗

“All user data and profiles are stored locally on the C: drive of each terminal server.”source ↗

“because users are tied to specific servers with local profiles and local data, moving them to another terminal server wasn’t really an option and whole situation turned into real chaos.”source ↗

No_Supermarket_5996 · r/sysadmin · 5 upvotes

“Anyone who is currently running cloud only devices and has services that don’t require Active Directory auth but are on prem how are you managing these? Through a domain or workgroups?”source ↗

Ok-Conversation1091 · r/sysadmin · 4 upvotes

Where this came up

r/sysadminactive directoryinfrastructureit managementserver managementsysadmin

People with this problem also raised