Andy Milford – Page 5

We Fixed Remote Desktop Shadowing (And Some Other Stuff)

May 8, 2019 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

One of the continuous laments that we’ve heard from our customer base, for years now concerns user session shadowing in Remote Desktop Services. This is a shame, because the internal architecture for shadowing from Windows Server 2012 R2 onwards is pretty amazing.

Using MSTSC to shadow however, eh, not so much.

Let’s Face It: Remote Desktop Shadowing Hasn’t Been a Great Experience For, Well . . . Forever!

The litany of complaints includes problems like:

lack of proper shadowing support (zoom out) for multiple monitor sessions
dreaded permissions errors
the unfortunate requirement for help desk users to be administrators on the terminal servers they want to shadow
the inability for Windows 7 systems to initiate shadowing on Server 2012/2016/2019 systems and Windows 8 and 10 workstations.

There was also the small issue that there were no tools for shadowing/remote assistance inside Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure.

As a result, admins and IT staff have been paying an arm and a leg for remote assistance tools to bridge this gap – tools that require heavy install footprints, hundreds or even thousands of dollars per technician per year, and tedious invitation URLs, etc are required to start helping users.

Which Reminds Us: Delegation of Administration Options for Remote Desktop Services Have Been Nonexistent For Way Too Long!

The other need that we hear frequently from our customers is the ability to precisely delegate Remote Desktop Services management permissions to their help desk and front line support staff. To date, the only real option has been to give help desk staff admin rights on session hosts and connection brokers. Not an ideal situation from a security, or a “whoops I just rebooted a terminal server with 30 user sessions running line of business apps” perspective.

We tried to resolve some of these issues with our RDSConfig utility, that allowed permissions reassignment for users and groups on session hosts. However, in larger RDS collections, you need a way to apply those permissions to a huge swath of session hosts all at once – especially as new session hosts are brought online. Also, to do their jobs, help desk staff need rights to query the Connection Broker to dynamically list RDS collections and the servers that are members of each, plus they should have the ability to read RDS-related performance counters on those session hosts, so they can troubleshoot things like network latency from the client to the server.

So, We Figured Out How To Make Shadowing Much Better AND Created a Wizard To Let You Delegate RDS Management Tasks To Your Help Desk Staff

We call these new tools in the Remote Desktop Commander Client Premium Management Features. For $99.99 per admin or help desk user per year, all of the aforementioned problems go away. Want to shadow Server 2012+ systems from Windows 7? No problem. Want to monitor multiple user sessions at once in live view in one window? We do that. Do you have RDS users with multiple monitors that you haven’t been able to shadow before? Again, we’ve got you covered.

Watch this quick video on YouTube to see these features in action:

Next, download the latest copy of the Remote Desktop Commander Lite client. Once you install it, you’ll be able to preview the SuperShadow features for 15 days. The RDS Management Delegation Wizard becomes available after you purchase a subscription from us.

Once you start your subscription, you’ll immediately be emailed a license file that will unlock all of those features.

**Note 1: With the release of Premium Management Features in Remote Desktop Commander Lite, legacy shadowing support for Windows Server 2008 and legacy shadowing through the MSTSC client were retired. These features remain available in our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution however.

**Note 2: If you are an existing Remote Desktop Commander Suite customer who would like to test these new Premium Management Features, please install the latest client on a VM or system OTHER than the system running the core Remote Desktop Commander Suite components.

Updated: November 2020.

Windows Virtual Desktop Officially Announced – My Take

September 24, 2018 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

This week at Ignite, Microsoft is announcing the introduction of Windows Virtual Desktop, a multi-user version of Windows 10 Enterprise that is deployable in Azure. Please see their blog post here about it.

I will have much more to say about this in future blog posts, but coupled with their heavy investments in “Remote Desktop Modern Infrastructure” (a.k.a RDmi for short) where RDS roles like the Connection Broker, Web Access, and Gateway are now simply PaaS components in Azure, this is going to upend the EUC/virtualization industry in an extreme way. The downward cost pressure Microsoft will place on user desktop and app hosting with this play will be tremendous. In the future at this blog and in webinars we host, we will analyze Windows Virtual Desktop licensing (with RDmi and compute costs factored in) versus traditional on-premise or datacenter-based Remote Desktop Services hosting on Server 2016/2019.

At first glance, I don’t think Windows Virtual Desktop will be good for Citrix, and I certainly think it will threaten Amazon’s DaaS offering. It’s also probably going to put a good swath of non-Azure based MSPs and CSPs out of business. I could be wrong, of course, but that’s my read on it right now.

Fortunately for our customers, we will be Windows Virtual Desktop ready in Q1 2019, and will be able to monitor multi-user Windows 10 instances just like Windows Server RDS session hosts. We look forward to continue to serving the Remote Desktop Services management and monitoring needs of all organizations, whether they run Windows Server or Windows 10 on premise, in the datacenter, or in Azure.

Azure RemoteApp – Sayonara!

August 12, 2016 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

Microsoft Announces Today That They’re Phasing Out Azure RemoteApp, and Transitioning Customers Over to a Citrix Solution Instead

Gabe Knuth first blogged on this possibility August 3rd, and now it has been confirmed.

From the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Blog:

Today we are announcing the next step in our broad partnership with Citrix in the remote desktop and applications space, which we recently expanded to address new scenarios for our joint customers on the Azure cloud.

Customers have provided us consistent feedback that they want a comprehensive, end-to-end, cloud-based solution for delivering Windows apps. The best way for us to deliver this is with Citrix through XenApp “express”, currently under development. XenApp “express” combines the simplicity of application remoting and the scalability of Azure with the security, management, and performance benefits of XenApp, to deliver Windows applications to any employee on any device. We will have much more to share on this offering through the coming months.

Key takeaways:

New purchases of Azure RemoteApp will end October 1st, 2016.
End of life date for existing Azure RemoteApp deployments will be August 31st, 2017. Migration of some sort will be required before then.

My thoughts – this is a smart move. As Gabe mentioned, Azure RemoteApp had issues with rapid scaling during logon storms and other load balancing issues. Also, there’s the practical aspect that most organizations, if they move their apps to the Cloud, also need to move the supporting infrastructure (e.g. database servers, CRM/ERP servers, Active Directory, etc). In that sense, it makes better sense to either leverage this new Citrix solution OR simply stand up a full Remote Desktop Services IaaS deployment in Azure. This will only be easier to do with the upcoming release of Microsoft Windows Server 2016.

Why I Created the PureRDS.org Resource Site

July 24, 2016 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

Let’s Face It, Small Shops Running SBC Solutions Are Not Well Supported

In the Server-Based Computing (SBC) community (e.g. Citrix, Microsoft RDS, VMware Horizon, etc), it’s fairly well-known that the vast majority of SBC implementations consist of 500 users or less. In contrast, the majority of marketing resources from vendors in the space go after chasing companies with 500 users or more. There’s a perception in our industry, rightly or wrongly, that the little shops are simply too expensive when it comes to acquiring their business and supporting them.

My area of expertise in the SBC community is Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, as I design monitoring software for that platform, and am currently a Microsoft MVP in this space. For many smaller shops who need to run SBC environments for teleworking, Microsoft RDS has been the platform of choice, as it only requires a single client access license (the RDS CAL), as opposed to Citrix, which requires not only the Microsoft RDS CAL, but the Citrix Concurrent License that runs on top.

Microsoft Has Recently Made Remote Desktop Services on Windows Server 2012 Harder To Deploy and Manage

Recently, I think that the partitioning of the SBC market that I talked about above (in terms of vendors only wanting to acquire and support medium to larger sized customers) has started to affect product architectural decision making as well. Citrix has continued to move up market, so much so that implementing their products almost always requires outside consulting expertise. In contrast, for the longest time, Microsoft RDS was relatively easier to deploy for even the smallest of shops – you’d turn some of your Windows Servers into Remote Desktop Session Hosts, and if you were a larger farm, you’d consider adding a Connection Broker Server, Remote Desktop Web Server, and Remote Desktop Gateway Server into that mix. Management was done through a handful of tools (TSAdmin, TSConfig, etc) that were fairly straightforward to use.

Enter Microsoft Windows Server 2012. Remote Desktop Services got a radical overhaul in Server 2012, and that overhaul has caused a considerable amount of pain for shops trying to migrate their RDS implementations from Server 2008 to Server 2012. One of the biggest painpoints in the Server 2012 ecosystem has been the restructuring of management tools for RDS. In order to manage user sessions and other configuration aspects, Microsoft moved these features out of those simple tools I mentioned earlier (TSAdmin, TSConfig, etc) into the Remote Desktop Services Manager overlay in the Windows Server Manager utility. Moreover, to even get the RDSM to work at all, the RDS implementation now must have a connection broker installed. And don’t even think about trying to stand up a full Windows Server 2012 RDS implementation in a workgroup – a domain environment is required.

If your implementation of RDS does not have enough roles to activate the RDSM in Server Manager, to date you’ve been forced to manage your session host servers predominantly with PowerShell scripts and command line tools.

PureRDS.org – a Resource Site For the Neglected Small Shops Running Microsoft Remote Desktop Services

All the above said, there are tons of organizations, with 500 users or less, who need quality resources for both their conventional (e.g. all RDS roles deployed) and unconventional (e.g. some RDS roles deployed, workgroup environments) RDS deployments. Thus, I decided to create PureRDS.org. Over time, it will become a rich repository of PowerShell management scripts, free tools, and other tips/tricks for smaller RDS deployments. The RDS community, while small compared to Citrix, continues to grow and deserves more resources. I hope PureRDS.org will help further fill that niche. Please check it out now and take advantage of all it can offer you!

New MUST HAVE Remote Desktop Services Hotfixes for Windows Server 2012 R2

April 27, 2016 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

Greetings again, folks.

Since the time of our last RDS Hotfix/Update post, the Remote Desktop Services team at Microsoft has released additional new hotfixes for Windows Server 2012 R2 RDS deployments. All of these are considered “must have” updates to make sure that your RDS deployment on Windows Server 2012 is nice and healthy. Read on and you’ll see why.

Redirected Drives, Printers, and Ports Get Really Slow in RDS Session

When connecting with Remote Desktop Services (RDS), working on any redirected resources (drives, printers, and ports) becomes very slow.
Are users complaining about sluggish redirected drive or printer access? Apply this update.

Yikes! Blue Screen of Death “Stop Error” on Windows Server 2012 R2 Acting as Remote Desktop Session Host

On a computer that’s running Windows Server 2012 R2 and Remote Desktop Services (RDS), you may experience a Stop error with message that resembles the following:
Stop: 0x000000C2 (0000000000000007, parameter2, parameter3, parameter4)
Or:
Stop: 0x0000003B (c0000005, parameter2, parameter3, parameter4)

Obviously, if your RDSH servers are blue-screening, apply this update post haste.

Connection Broker Issues and Delays On Your Busy RDS Farm?

If there’s a significant high number of remote desktop connections that are made to a High-Availability RD Connection Broker in a short duration of time, you may encounter the following issues: 1.) The connections experience long delays, or users are never connected to the system. 2.) High CPU usage on SQL Server that’s used with High Availability-based Connection Broker.

This is a must apply update for the RDS Connection Broker on Windows Server 2012 if you’ve been running into scalability issues.

Windows Server 2012 R2 Running the Remote Desktop Gateway Role Crashes

The RD Gateway server crashes because of a conflicting operation where the user disconnects the connection at the same time when the server also ends the connection.

Apparently if a user tries to disconnect at the same time a server is trying to disconnect them on their own, the RD Gateway server goes Tango Uniform. Better apply this update.

That’s all for now.

— Your humble Microsoft RDS MVP

Do you need complete RDS/XenDesktop monitoring & reporting for only $9 per server per month? Review our sample reports and watch demonstration videos here.