Monday, March 25, 2013

Unified Remote Access and Deployment

I’ve just finished looking at a recently published book: Windows Server 2010 Unified Remote Access Planning and Deployment written by Erez Ben-Ari and Bala Natarajan. Erez has written several books related to this subject for Packt and is a PSS engineer at Microsoft. Bala is a Program Manager in Windows networking team – so these guys should be in the know as to this technology.

Windows Server 2012 Unified Remote Access Planning and Deployment

Unified Remote Access is the new name for the Direct Access feature added to Windows in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. With Direct Access/URA, a client is able to access internal resources on an internal network via encrypted IPv6 tunnels. While URA is a pretty technical subject – and potentially difficult to setup, the book takes you through the key planning, setup and management topics. It’s worth noting that while setting up URA is complex and potentially disastrous if setup badly, Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making the installation wizard doing most of the hard work.

The book also looks more deeply at both Group Policy and PKI which are fundamental technologies used with URA. The final chapter of the book is a good look at troubleshooting. Given the complexity of URA, I almost think this content could go earlier if only as a warning to the unwary.

All in all, it looks a good book to have if you are planning to deploy URA in your organisation.

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1 comment:

Ghalib Ayaz said...

I loved the post. It describes well the unified remote access system
Ghalib from
http://www.ironnetworks.com/Unified-Remote-Access