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IAP Desktop is a Windows application that allows you to manage multiple Remote Desktop connections to Windows VM instances that run on Google Cloud.
To increase security and flexibility, IAP Desktop uses Identity-Aware-Proxy TCP tunneling to connect to VM instance, combining the convenience of a Remote Desktop connection manager with the advantages of Identity-Aware-Proxy.
Using RDP over a Cloud IAP TCP forwarding has several key advantages:
- You can connect to VM instance that do not have a public IP address or NAT access to the internet.
- Because the TCP forwarding tunnel is established over HTTPS, you can connect even if your workstation is behind a corporate firewall or proxy.
- You can control who should be allowed to connect to a VM in a fine-grained manner by using Cloud IAM.
- You do not need to expose RDP over the public internet.
IAP Desktop also provides a number of additional features that make working with Windows VMs on Google Cloud more convinient:
- Generate Windows logon credentials lets you create a user and generates a password for a Windows VM instance and saves the credentials in RDCMan. If a Windows account does not exist on the instance yet, the command will create a new local Administrator account, otherwise it will reset the password of the existing account. This feature requires the Compute Engine Admin role in GCP.
- Show serial port output tails the serial port output of an instance. This feature allows you to observe the boot process or analyze startup issues.
- Open in Cloud Console takes you to the instance details in the Cloud Console.
- Show Stackdriver logs takes you to the logs of the VM instance. Learn more about installing and using IAP Desktop.