Greetings friends and current Remote Desktop Commander customers! We’ve just released Version 5.1 of our Remote Desktop Commander Lite, Premium Management Features, and Remote Desktop Commander Suite solutions. While largely a maintenance release, Version 5.1 introduces a new Drain Mode Helper for RDS collections and AVD hostpools – and this feature is available in both the free Remote Desktop Commander Lite and commercial Premium Management Features and Remote Desktop Commander Suite releases. In addition to this new feature, Version 5.1 offers some performance enhancements and improvements to the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and Premium Management Features solutions:
- The Remote Desktop Reporter Service has been further optimized for larger environments. Specifically, SQL query improvements have been made to reduce locking and waits when inserting lots of agent data.
- The new CPU Usage By Application Dashboard has been optimized for larger environments, so that it loads relevant data faster.
- Areas of the software that research items online, such as process names, connecting IP addresses, disconnect reasons, etc., now load a full instance of a web browser when researching those items on Google. This makes those research features more compatible across a wider variety of operating systems and web browsers.
- It’s now easier to build custom computer groupings for related RDS or AVD hosts in the Remote Desktop Commander Session Navigator. We’ve improved the code that retrieves computer accounts from the domain controller, making it easy to add both server and workstations to the Remote Desktop Session Navigator for management tasks.
Finally, as we begin development on the next version of the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, we want to hear from you regarding the new features you want to see in our products. Read on for a link to our product features survey below – all participants in the survey will be entered into a drawing for a $150 Amazon Gift Card, in which a winner will be selected at random after the survey deadline closes.
In this RDPSoft E-Newsletter:
Using The New Drain Mode Helper
New Performance Enhancements and Tweaks in Version 5.1
Participate In Our Product Features Survey For A Chance To Win a $150 Amazon Gift Card
Version 5.1 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links
Check On and Change the Status of Drain Mode On Multiple RDS and AVD Hosts With Our New Drain Mode Helper
Administrators of medium and larger sized Remote Desktop Services and Azure Virtual Desktop environments know how tricky it can be to manage drain mode across all of their session hosts. It’s easy to put a host into drain mode for maintenance yet forget to take it out of drain mode later, causing problems related to load balancing. When too few servers have to pick up the slack of too many sessions, bad things happen.
As a result, we created the new Drain Mode Helper, which is now available for ALL of our user base – both users of the free Remote Desktop Commander Lite utility and our commercial Premium Management Features and Remote Desktop Commander Suite customers can leverage this feature.
Using the Drain Mode Helper is easy. Simply select the RDS collection, AVD host pool, or manual grouping of RDS session hosts from the left hand tree view in the Remote Desktop Commander Client’s Session Navigator. Then choose the “Check and Manage Drain Mode on Computers” menu item.
The Drain Mode Helper will then launch and quickly retrieve the drain mode status on all of the hosts in that RDS Collection or AVD Host Pool. You can easily select all of the hosts that are in drain mode to take them out of drain mode, or vice versa.
This tool is sophisticated enough to realize when it is dealing with an RDS collection versus an AVD host pool. When dealing with an RDS collection, it adjusts drain mode on the individual servers. When working with an AVD host pool, it adjusts the drain mode status of the host(s) directly via the Azure Virtual Desktop brokering infrastructure.
New Performance Enhancements And Tweaks In the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and Premium Management Features
At RDPSoft, we’re always working to further improve and optimize our software based on customer feedback. Version 5.1 has several of these optimizations, as discussed in depth below.
First, we optimized some internal SQL statements in the Remote Desktop Reporter Service, which reduces locks and waits when Remote Desktop Commander is transferring large amounts of agent data collected from session hosts into the relevant tables. This results in reduced resource usage on the SQL Server and speeds up the time it takes to transfer this data into the SQL database.
Secondly, in our newer CPU Usage By Application dashboard, we added optimizations so that this dashboard will only show up to 2500 records maximum of programs using the most CPU, regardless of the size of the environment. This will speed up the loading and display of data in this dashboard for our larger customers.
Thirdly, we improved the “research” buttons throughout the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and Premium Management Features tools, that would automatically try to lookup things like process names, IP addresses, and RDP disconnect reasons via Google. In previous versions, we’d use an internal web browser component to display the results, but this did not always work reliably on some operating systems with certain security settings, so now research tasks shell out to a separate default web browser instance for improved compatibility.
Finally, we updated the Computer Group builder in the Remote Desktop Commander Client. In certain environments, like Citrix, you may need to build logical groupings of session hosts or virtual desktops that don’t correlate to an RDS collection or AVD host pool. Version 5.1 makes it easier to build computer groups – simply enter in your domain name, click the Refresh button, and Remote Desktop Commander will quickly do a deep search in Active Directory to return all servers, and optionally, all workstations. You can then select the ones you want to incorporate into a custom computer grouping.
What New Features Would You Like Us To Add?
We’ve got many great ideas about new features that we want to add to Remote Desktop Commander, but we’d like you to help us prioritize them- so that we add the features that will benefit the majority of our clients first.
As a way of saying thank you, if you complete the survey at the link below, you will automatically be entered into a drawing for a $150 Amazon gift card. Please, only complete one survey per person. The survey closes on September 30th, 2021, and we will inform the winner shortly thereafter.
To start the survey, please click here.
Remote Desktop Commander 5.1 Upgrade, Purchase, and Demo Links
Request a web demo with an RDPSoft solutions expert to see all our solutions’ features in depth.
