About Andy Milford

Andy Milford is the CEO and Founder of RDPSoft, and is a Microsoft MVP in the Enterprise Mobility / Remote Desktop Services area. Prior to starting RDPSoft, Andy was the CEO and Founder of Dorian Software, a log management company acquired by Ipswitch in late 2009. He loves creating easy-to-use yet powerful software solutions for SMBs and emerging enterprise companies.

WVD Monitoring – Step By Step

August 24, 2020 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

Greetings friends and customers!

The latest versions of the Remote Desktop Commander Suite (Version 4.9) and Remote Desktop Canary (Version 2.2) support the full monitoring of Windows Virtual Desktop, whether or not WVD is deployed in Fall 2019 (Classic) Mode, or Spring Update 2020 (ARM / Azure Resource Manager) Mode.

Here are the steps you need to take to deploy our solutions to monitor your Windows Virtual Desktop environment:

Step 1 – Provision a VM inside your WVD tenant or Azure Resource Group to run our software.

You may already have a VM deployed with management and monitoring tools on it, or you may wish to deploy a new one. All of our solutions work perfectly well on Server 2012 R2, Server 2016, Server 2019 or on Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session (EVD). You can always elect to place this VM in its own separate host pool, and then publish it as a desktop to your help desk and admin team so they can connect in and run tools when needed via the Windows Virtual Desktop client.

The key thing to remember is that this VM should be located on the same VNet and joined to the same Active Directory + Azure Active Directory domain as the WVD hosts you will be monitoring.

Step 2 – Install SQL Server Express or Azure SQL to store the WVD monitoring data collected by our solutions.

If you have a very small WVD deployment, with 3 or fewer hosts, you can most likely install SQL Server Express on the VM you created in Step 1 above. The Remote Desktop Commander Suite installer will prompt to do this for you automatically.

If you have a larger WVD deployment, you should leverage an Azure SQL database to store the WVD monitoring data instead. We find the most cost effective way to utilize Azure SQL is to opt for a single database, per-DTU model (as opposed to vCore). Using this approach, Azure SQL database costs for 90% of our customers will run somewhere between $30 and $150 USD per month, depending on the number of WVD hosts they are monitoring. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to provision Azure SQL for our solutions.

To help defray these infrastructure costs for our WVD customers, we have introduced a special discount of $2 off per WVD host per month for the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, and $3 off per WVD host per month if you opt for our Complete WVD Monitoring and Management Bundle. Even if you only have 3 WVD hosts, your cost would only be $7.99 per host per month for the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, and $13.99 per host per month for our Complete WVD Monitoring and Management Bundle! Click here for the details about this promotion that is valid through the end of this year.

Step 3 – Define a service account in your domain that will monitor your WVD hosts, and make the necessary Windows firewall and registry adjustments on those hosts.

This knowledge base article covers the few adjustments you need to make on your Windows Virtual Desktop hosts to allow them to be monitored correctly, especially if they are running Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session. You may wish to define a GPO in your Active Directory that adjusts these settings for you.

Step 4 – Install the Remote Desktop Commander Suite and Remote Desktop Canary to your VM you created in Step 1, and optionally install the Remote Desktop Commander agents on your WVD hosts.

Install the Remote Desktop Commander Suite on the VM you created in Step 1. Link it to SQL Server Express or Azure SQL, and set its service account. Then, add the WVD hosts via the Remote Desktop Commander Configuration Tool, using the Import From WVD Broker wizard. If you would like to collect rich, detailed information on performance per user session and per application, install the agent service on each WVD host.

Importing WVD hosts into RDPSoft solutions is a snap.

Then, install our Remote Desktop Canary solution on the same VM. Set up a synthetic login test workflow against one of your WVD hosts, then clone that workflow against the rest of your WVD hosts. Now, Remote Desktop Canary can begin to continuously monitor your WVD hosts, verifying their responsiveness all the way through the login sequence into the desktop presentation. In WVD (as compared to RDS), Microsoft now handles the infrastructure roles of the Gateway and Broker, so determining login problems, slow login times, and user profile/black screen issues requires a close eye on the WVD hosts themselves.

Step 5 – Launch your WVD client, connect to the VM you created in Step 1, and marvel at the rich analytics and WVD monitoring tools now available at your fingertips!

Test RDP Connectivity on Multiple WVD Hosts At Once — Remote Desktop Canary can perform a routine RDP connectivity check on multiple WVD hosts at once.

Need Better Windows Virtual Desktop Monitoring and Management? Take Advantage Of This Special Offer!

August 24, 2020 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

Hi there!

Are you in the process of deploying, or have you already deployed Windows Virtual Desktop?

Are you struggling with the lack of native WVD monitoring and WVD management tools? For example, do you need:

Say no more. We’ve got you covered. If you start a monthly subscription to our WVD monitoring and WVD management solutions on or before December 31st, 2020, we’ll give you an extra per-host VM per-month discount.

Specifically, you’re entitled to a special discount of $2 off per WVD host per month for the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, and $3 off per WVD host per month if you opt for our Complete WVD Monitoring and Management Bundle.

That means that even in the smallest environments (e.g. only 3 WVD hosts), your costs will only be $7.99 per host VM per month for the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, and $13.99 per host VM per month for the full Complete WVD Monitoring and Management Bundle! And if you have more than a handful of hosts, we offer volume discounts that will make it even more affordable. Note – the pricing above is per host VM per month, not per user!

You simply will not find a better deal in the market in terms of price per features for comprehensive monitoring and management of your WVD infrastructure. And we keep adding more and more WVD specific features to our solutions, month after month.

Here’s what you need to do to get started.

Click here to request a quote to monitor your WVD environment. Make sure to include the number of host VMs and the number of admin/help desk users that will be managing the environment. Indicate in the form comments that you want our “WVD Deal.”

We’ll get back in touch with you shortly thereafter to verify your needs, find out more about your WVD deployment, and provide pricing. We will also supply you with a coupon code for the discounts mentioned above.

Act now before year end to secure this special offer. We look forward to bringing you on board as yet another satisfied RDPSoft customer.

TSAdmin Replacement For Server 2012, 2016, and 2019

July 22, 2020 By Andy Milford 1 Comment

For more than 7 years, I have had the privilege of talking to server based computing admins worldwide, discovering the key pain points they must overcome when taking care of their day-to-day management tasks, especially if they manage Remote Desktop Services deployments.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loss of TSAdmin featured prominently in these discussions. But, more on that in a moment.

The result of these discussions? Remote Desktop Commander. This next step in the evolution of our Remote Desktop Services solution set was developed in direct response to the specific pain points I heard articulated time and time again by RDS admins.

No More TSAdmin in Windows Server 2012

Without a doubt, one of the biggest issues Windows server admins have been dealing with as they migrate from Server 2008 RDS deployments to RDS on Server 2012, 2016, and 2019 is the lack of a simple and powerful RDP management tool. The realization starts when TSAdmin.msc isn’t where it’s supposed to be. After a little more research, they discover that the TSAdmin msc isn’t there at all!

For almost everyone, TSAdmin had been the go-to for some of the most common terminal server user session and process management tasks to perform on terminal servers and session hosts in their RDS collections.

This issue of its absence first came to light with the release of Windows Server 2012, as the former TSAdmin (Remote Desktop Services Manager) utility was orphaned by Microsoft. Terminal Server session management tasks were, in the opinion of many, very poorly integrated into the Remote Desktop Services Manager (RDSM) in the Server Manager program. Moreover, if your RDS collections are more than a few dozen session hosts in size, the Remote Desktop Services Manager can hang and simply will not scale properly.

Remote Desktop Commander replaces TSAdmin on Server 2012 — Managing Server 2012 User Sessions with Remote Desktop Commander

With many admins still not comfortable using PowerShell scripting to do Remote Desktop Services and Windows Virtual Desktop management tasks, the situation has become untenable.

As a result, some admins turned to our free Remote Desktop Admin Toolkit, which was a collection of basic tools that could do limited user session and process management tasks. However, none of these tools were integrated with each other, and their feature set was rather limited.

A Free TSAdmin Replacement for Remote Desktop Services Deployments

As a result, we built an integrated, easy-to-use, and powerful terminal server management utility: Remote Desktop Commander Lite.

Viewing Process Memory Consumption By User on Server 2012 — Viewing Process Memory Consumption by User on Server 2012

The Remote Desktop Services Manager features for Windows Server 2012/2016/2019 that ship with RDPSoft’s Remote Desktop Commander are too numerous to list. Therefore, rather than us “bullet point” you to death, take a look at our video introduction to Remote Desktop Commander on YouTube demonstrating the intuitiveness and power of this utility.

One of the most interesting things you will see in this video is how Remote Desktop Commander can intelligently group related fields, in order to show you things like total memory consumed by user, by server, or RDP bandwidth, for instance. There are also features we provide that were never present in TSAdmin, such as the ability to review RDP latency and connection quality for multiple user sessions at once.

Running Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure? No problem. All of our solutions, including Remote Desktop Commander, also work well inside Windows Virtual Desktop environments. In fact, you can publish our tools as a WVD RemoteApp and use it to manage your WVD host pools from anywhere!

Which Edition of Remote Desktop Commander Do You Need?

Because we know that all of our customers may not need a comprehensive monitoring and reporting solution for their RDS, WVD, and Citrix farms at this time, we now offer several different classes of license:

Viewing Server 2012 session process memory consumption, grouped by heaviest memory consumers.

Remote Desktop Commander Lite – completely free for all RDS, WVD and Citrix farm admins – and it provides you with the ‘TSAdmin like’ session management features you need for day-to-day administration of your Remote Desktop Services, WVD, and Citrix server farms.

Premium Management Features for Remote Desktop Commander Lite – adds a powerful feature superset to Remote Desktop Commander, and overcomes some of the shortcomings in Microsoft’s shadowing technology, giving you a very powerful RMM tool designed specifically for support Remote Desktop user sessions and Remote App sessions. Additionally, it allows you to delegate specific RDS and WVD management tasks to help desk staff across your RDS collections and WVD hostpools without making them admins, which is not available in Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services Manager. It also solves shadowing issues in Citrix, such as the requirement to obtain consent before shadowing, and Citrix Director’s dependence on Remote Assistance. Best of all, it only costs $99.99 per help desk technician or admin per year, which is much less expensive than typical RMM tools.

Remote Desktop Commander Suite – which only costs $9.99 per monitored RDS, WVD, or Citrix host per month – gives you TSAdmin replacement management capabilities outlined above, but also includes:

Our Remote Desktop Reporter utility for historical session user activity, RDS, WVD, and Citrix performance monitoring and reporting, license reporting, connection quality/RDP latency reporting, RDP security (login and login failure) tracking, and session recording
SPL Tracker, which helps MSPs and others automate the chore of Microsoft SPLA and Citrix CSP license reporting

Free Remote Desktop Commander Software

What makes the most sense for you? Remote Desktop Commander Lite, our Premium Management Features overlay, the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, or Remote Desktop Canary? Visit our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle page to learn more about each product as well as licensing options.

Citrix Shadowing Without Notification

June 30, 2020 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

While most of our customer base runs Microsoft Remote Desktop Services and Windows Virtual Desktop, we have a substantial subset of customers who use our tools to manage their Citrix environments. Most of our Citrix customers use our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution to gain valuable insights about Citrix host performance and user activity monitoring, without spending lots of extra money on higher Citrix licensing tiers, and/or the Citrix Analytics service. When you consider that our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution often runs less than $0.70 per user per month to implement, it is a “no brainer” in terms of cost savings.

Over the past year, we’ve gotten lots of great feedback from our RDS and WVD customers who have adopted our Premium Management Features overlay to provide delegation of administration to help desk staff, as well as offer improved shadowing, remote assistance, and live monitoring capabilities to admins, support staff, and managers. During this time, we heard from some of our Citrix customers that needed these same sorts of capabilities.

Citrix Shadowing Limitations

The first question we pondered was “why are Citrix customers asking us for this?” Citrix touts its solution as an extremely robust end user computing platform that greatly exceeds what comes out of the box with RDS or WVD. And certainly shadowing and delegation of administration is something that is provided by Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as well as their cloud-based offerings.

Well, we talked at length with our Citrix customers and learned of several shortcomings in the way they implemented shadowing in their more recent product versions. As a result, we made a few tweaks to our Premium Management Features overlay to make it completely compatible with Citrix environments, as well as RDS and WVD. Here is a list those shortcomings and how our Premium Management Features product overcomes it.

Citrix Shadowing Depends On Remote Assistance Being Installed On the Help Desk Technician’s Computer, Among Other Things…

To start shadowing a Citrix session, you log into Citrix Director, find the user’s session, and press “Shadow.” Citrix Director generates a Microsoft Remote Assistance file (invite.msrcincident), which you must load into the Microsoft Remote Assistance client (MSRA.exe) to start shadowing.

You better have the Microsoft Remote Assistance feature installed AND line of sight to your Citrix servers if you want to shadow sessions.

While MSRA.exe is already installed on most client operating systems like Windows 10, it is not installed by default on server operating systems like Server 2012, Server 2016, and Server 2019. If it is not installed already, a help desk technician will simply download a file they can do nothing with until the Microsoft Remote Assistance feature has been installed. On top of that, you better hope that your help desk technician’s PC that is running MSRA.exe has line of sight to the Citrix host with the target session to be shadowed. Otherwise, shadowing will not work, because the Remote Assistance ports are selected dynamically from a range, and there is no facility (unlike with modern STUN/TURN/ICE protocols) to wiggle a way through your firewall to connect to the Citrix server.

Our Premium Management Features solution, on the other hand, has zero dependencies on the Microsoft Remote Assistance client. In the Remote Desktop Commander Client with Premium Management Features enabled, the help desk technician simply selects the user session – or sessions plural, because our software can shadow multiple user sessions at once – and then starts the shadowing process. Nothing else is required – the help desk tech is taken directly into the user session. Watch this video to see how easy it is:

Because of this, our Remote Desktop Commander Client can be published as a seamless application, and help desk technicians can now support end users from ANYWHERE, even if they do not have line of sight access to the Citrix hosts running the user sessions, since our client will be running as an app on your servers in the Citrix environment.

Citrix Shadowing Requires User Consent

Currently, there is no way in Citrix to natively shadow a Citrix user’s session without obtaining consent through Microsoft Remote Assistance first. Citrix’s own KB article spells this out. This is a major problem, as there are numerous use cases where consent before shadowing is not desirable. As an example:

Some highly regulated industries require that user activity be observable at any time by supervisors and managers to ensure compliance.
Other industries require that managers have the ability to review worker activity at any time to ensure customer satisfaction.
Educational institutions may need to have the ability to observe and monitor student activity to ensure compliance with policies or to aid in teaching.

Our Premium Management Features solution, with its new Citrix Management Delegation Wizard, allows administrators to set shadowing policies on Citrix hosts so that consent is not required when shadowing a session, and then specifically control which users/managers have the right to perform a shadowing action. Furthermore, our software’s user interface allows help desk technicians and managers to monitor and observe multiple user sessions at the same time with our special “Mini View Dock.”

Use the Management Delegation Wizard to adjust permissions and shadowing policies on all of your RDS, WVD, or Citrix hosts.

Citrix Shadowing and Management Delegation

Admittedly, Citrix has much better management delegation capabilities when compared with RDS or WVD. Still, there are some challenges. Unless you are a customer at one of the highest licensing tiers, you will probably have to choose a preset delegation level. For shadowing, this would typically be the Help Desk Administrator role. Unfortunately, this role also gives extremely powerful rights to those users, such as being able to terminate processes, place servers in a delivery group into maintenance, and also perform power operations.

The built in Help Desk Administrator role offers a lot of power, perhaps too much power…

Our Premium Management Features solutions simplifies this considerably, allowing you to delegate out specific granular management and shadowing tasks to your users, without making them admins on those hosts or giving them rights that could lead to them accidentally taking a server offline. Common management tasks such as shadowing, logging users off, disconnecting users, and messaging users can be assigned to specific users or groups in Active Directory. Then, they only have the rights to perform those specific tasks as required.

What Are You Waiting For? At Only $99.99 Per Named Admin, Help Desk, or Manager User Per Year, Our Premium Management Features Solution is a Bargain!

Click here to learn more about the Premium Management Features overlay for Remote Desktop Commander.

Click here to start an annual subscription on a named admin/help desk/manager user basis.

Click here to request a quote or start a dialogue with our sales team.

RDPwned: A Guide To Securing Microsoft Remote Desktop Services

April 7, 2020 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

Greetings, friends and loyal customers! After over a year of research, my new book on how to secure your RDS environments has finally been published.

RDPwned - A Guide to Securing Microsoft Remote Desktop Services — Click here to purchase the Amazon Kindle edition for only $9.99 USD

Given how many of you are standing up new Remote Desktop Services deployments or expanding existing ones right now to facilitate teleworking during the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s imperative that you get serious about RDS security. Hackers and APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) teams know that businesses around the world are “opening up their doors wide” to facilitate remote working at the moment, and they may come knocking at yours soon. Don’t unwittingly let them in.

My book first walks you through how attackers find your RDS deployments, using normal search engines and device fingerprinting search engines like Shodan. Then I show you the tools hackers use to break into your environment, by performing dictionary attacks, man-in-the-middle compromises, or client-side credential stealing. Next, I illustrate some of the most common techniques and scripts they will use to escalate their privileges from a lowly standard user all the way up to local admin and domain admin, and how they are able to deploy and run these scripts and malware on your servers. Finally, I discuss the major types of defenses you can deploy to reduce the likelihood of being attacked, and how to mitigate the damage if you are.

An Exclusive Offer Through December 2020

As a way of saying thanks to all users of RDPSoft software who wish to purchase this book, we’ve crafted a special promotion:

All individuals and companies that purchase a copy of my new book – just $9.99 on Amazon Kindle – through the end of December 2020 are also entitled to 1 server license of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite software for a month.

What can you do with a license of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite for a month? Here are a few ideas:

All you need to do to claim your 1 server, 1 month Remote Desktop Commander Suite license is to email inquiries [at] rdpsoft [dot] com with a screenshot of your Amazon Kindle purchase receipt.