Different UI Languages on RDS farm

A customer asked me to provide some users with an other Windows UI language on their RDS environment. The users are from the same Active Directory Users OU, accessing one group of RDS Session hosts . This blog talks about how different display UI languages can be applied to an RDS farm.

1. First of all, download the most recent language pack from Microsoft here.

2. After the ISO has been downloaded, right-click ISO and mount it.

3. Browse to: <Mounted drive>\x64\langpacks. In this case G:\x64\langpacks

4. Copy all or only the required language packs to a file share or a local folder (in this case C:\Temp\Languagepacks on the server that needs the required language packs.

5. Run the following command: lpksetup /i * /p C:\Temp\Languagepacks. The languagepack will automatically be installed form the specified folder.

6. Open GPMC (Group Policy Management Console) and create a new policy, specifying the name that shows the UI language in it. For example: ”RDS-UI-Language-(en-us)”.

7. In the policy that was just opened browse to Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\System\Group Policy\Configure user Group Policy loopback processing mode and change it to enable and select Replace..

8. In the same GPO browse to User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Control Panel\Regional and Language Options and enable the option ”Restrict the UI Languages Windows should use for the selected user” and also select the UI language to be used.

9. Repeat creating GPO’s for any other language. In my case, I ended up with one GPO as the default UI language was set to Dutch: RDS-UI-Language-(en-us).

10. Next step is to apply the GPO the OU the RDSH-servers reside. Be sure the GPO link order is specified correctly. In my case the link of the RDS-UI-Language-(en-us) policy was set to 3 and the default RDS GPO was to set 4. This allows the specific language setting to be applied instead of the default UI language that was specified in the default RDS server GPO.

11. Then you need to create an Active Directory security group for example with the name of the UI Language and put users in this group that explicitly need the selected language. This group will be used in the group filtering of the created GPO.

12. I the security filtering pane first the Authenticated Users group needs to be removed (otherwise all users would get or not get the GPO applied) and add to Active Directory Group that was created previously must be added. The result would usually be that the required UI language is available for users that are part of the specified Active Directory group only. In my case at this customer settings were not applied successfully.

13. After doing some troubleshooting I found out that the created GPO did not apply successfully. Testing the GPO on another OU with some test users in it worked fine.

The resolution in this case was to also add the RDSH servers of the RDS farm as well to the Security Filtering pane. Then users that were part of the Active Directory RDS UI language group did get to right UI language when they logged in.

Different UI Languages on RDS farm

My Posts