Remote Desktop Connection inside Azure Arc Enabled Server Windows Admin Center extension

Bojan Zivkovic 646 Reputation points

Hi, is there a way to improve RDP connection inside Azure Arc Enabled Server Windows Admin Center extension - resolution is terrible making RDP connection practically useless?

  1. Bojan Zivkovic 646 Reputation points

    Thanks, everything worked flawlessly.

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Answer accepted by question author

Suchitra Suregaunkar 14,595 Reputation points • Microsoft External Staff • Moderator

Hello @Bojan Zivkovic

The Remote Desktop tool within the Windows Admin Center (WAC) extension for Azure Arc-enabled servers is a browser-based experience. By design, it renders the remote session inside your browser window, and there is currently no setting within WAC to adjust or improve the RDP display resolution. This is a known limitation of the embedded browser-based RDP tool in WAC.

WAC in Azure is designed so that "Windows Server infrastructure and workload management no longer requires you to establish line-of-sight or Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) you can manage everything natively from the Azure portal" meaning WAC's strength is its native management tools PowerShell, file management, registry, services, firewall, performance monitoring, etc, not the embedded RDP session.

If you need a full-resolution, native RDP experience, the recommended approach is to use RDP over SSH tunneled through Azure Arc using the Azure CLI. This launches your local RDP client (e.g., mstsc.exe) with full resolution and display settings no public IP or open inbound ports required.

Please look into below steps to set up RDP over SSH via Azure Arc:

Prerequisites:

  • Azure Connected Machine agent version 1.31 or higher on the Arc-enabled server.
  • OpenSSH Server (sshd) must be enabled and running on the target machine. Starting with Windows Server 2025, OpenSSH is installed by default. For earlier versions, you can verify with below commands:
Get-WindowsCapability -Online | Where-Object Name -like 'OpenSSH*'
Get-Service sshd
  • Owner or Contributor role on the Arc-enabled server resource.

Setup:

Register the HybridConnectivity resource provider (one-time per subscription): 

az provider register -n Microsoft.HybridConnectivity

Install the Azure CLI SSH extension: 

az extension add --name ssh

Sign in to Azure: 

az login

Connect using native RDP: 

az ssh arc --resource-group <yourResourceGroup> --name <yourArcServerName> --local-user <localUsername> --rdp

This will launch your native RDP client through a secure Azure Arc tunnel, giving you full control over resolution, display settings, and multi-monitor support.

References:

Kindly let us know if the solution provided worked for you.

If you need any further assistance, please feel free to reach out.

If you found the comment helpful, please consider clicking "Upvote it".

Thanks,

Suchitra.

  1. Suchitra Suregaunkar 14,595 Reputation points • Microsoft External Staff • Moderator

    Hello @Bojan Zivkovic

    Thank you for the upvote.

    We are glad that the provided information helped you. Along with that Accepting the answer is equally important because it confirms the resolution and helps others in the community quickly find verified solutions. It also reflects the success of our joint effort to resolve your query. If anything is still unclear or you need further assistance, please let us know.

    We are happy to help.

    So, kindly consider marking the answer as Accepted and this helps other community members who may encounter a similar issue in the future.

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    Thanks,

    Suchitra.

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1 additional answer

  1. AI answer

    The RDP session quality in the Windows Admin Center (WAC) extension for Azure Arc–enabled servers is constrained by the browser-based experience and the available network and compute resources. There is no separate “high‑resolution” toggle in the WAC extension itself, but RDP responsiveness and effective resolution can be improved by focusing on the same bottlenecks used for Remote Desktop graphics optimization:

    1. Reduce load on the Arc-enabled server
      • Reduce the number of active user sessions on the server while using the WAC RDP tool.
      • Ensure the server has sufficient CPU and memory; if it is resource‑constrained, increase compute and memory where possible so that it can render the remote session more smoothly.
    2. Optimize network conditions
      • Reduce the number of concurrent sessions per host that share the same network path to improve available bandwidth per session.
      • Use a higher‑bandwidth, lower‑latency network from the admin’s side (for example, avoid congested Wi‑Fi when using the Azure portal and WAC).
      • If possible, lower the effective resolution or visual complexity inside the session (for example, disable animations and visual effects in the remote OS) so that fewer pixels need to be transmitted.
    3. Avoid deep inspection or tunneling of RDP traffic
      • If the environment uses TLS inspection, VPN, or Secure Web Gateway tunnels that intercept or re‑route RDP traffic, this can add latency, jitter, and reduce throughput. Where security policy allows, bypass TLS inspection and unnecessary VPN/SWG tunnels for RDP-related endpoints so the nested RDP traffic used by Azure/WAC can flow with minimal overhead.
    4. Use Windows Admin Center for management tasks instead of full desktop when possible
      • For many administrative operations (services, registry, files, roles/features, performance, etc.), use the native WAC tools instead of the embedded RDP session. This avoids the overhead of a full remote desktop and often provides a faster, more responsive management experience over Arc.

    If the embedded RDP session remains unusable after optimizing server resources and network conditions, use a direct RDP connection (where security and connectivity allow) for high‑resolution work, and reserve the WAC RDP tool for quick, lightweight access.

    References:

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