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.
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How to manage on-premises servers without an Active Directory domain
- 1Using a Windows workgroup for peer-to-peer configurationDid this help you?
- 2Maintaining an on-premises Active Directory connected via VPNDid this help you?
- 3Entra join or Entra DSDid this help you?
- 4Keeping users siloed to their specific standalone servers with local profilesDid this help you?
- 5Planning to redesign the environment using an RDS farm, brokers, and FSLogix profilesDid this help you?
- 6Considering cloud alternatives like Azure Virtual DesktopDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“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 ↗
“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 ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2How to manage unmanaged Linux workstations across an organization
- 2How to manage internal DNS without running a domain controller
- 2Transitioning from cloud to on-premises AD and server admin
- 2How to handle SSO and device management for local AD and M365?
- 3How do you manage accounts and passwords that don't use SSO?
- 4Thrown into managing cloud architecture with no experience