Minas Tirith. credit: http://lajk.hu/

Minas Morgul.
credit: http://www.lotrscenerybuilder.org/

Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul are two fortified cities from famous Tolkien’s Middle-Earth fictional world. In my current project, I had to connect from my Mac Book Pro (development machine) to remote Windows 2012 EC2 instance. Which means that I had to connect two Minas (means tower) from our current IT world, Microsoft and Apple. At the beginning, that mission seemed impossible. I tried various tools with various connection parameters.

To ease your pain, I finally found appropriate tool. This is Microsoft Remote Desktop for OSX.
For connection parameter user name be sure to put domain_name.local\your_user_name. This was not an obvious setting, and I spent some time with trial/error approach to figure it out. And connection lag does not make you to crash your precious Mac book.

credit: http://blog.monitis.com/

credit: http://9to5mac.com/

Happy connecting!