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BriForum Recap: Storm Clouds Over Citrix, Microsoft Rising

August 10, 2015 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

It’s been a little over two weeks since BriForum 2015 ended out in Denver, and as usual, it was a blast, filled with knowledgeable speakers and engaged attendees covering the entire gamut of virtualization and server-based computing. This year, I had the privilege of being a BriForum speaker, focusing my talk on the hidden benefits provided by Version 8 of the Remote Desktop Protocol available in Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 and later operating systems.

One of the larger trends I’m seeing, which was echoed by many speakers at BriForum – at least in the server-based computing segment – is how Citrix’s star is fading as a viable solution for mid-market companies. It’s gotten so bad that key shareholders in Citrix (e.g. Elliot) have effectively forced Citrix to start the spin off of some of its assets and have forced out Mark Templeton as CEO. There’s a lot to this story, and Gabe Knuth has summed it up much more comprehensively than I can, so read his post for all of the gory details.

What is getting less press, but in my mind is just as or more important, is the fact that Citrix has made critical internal personnel decisions over the past few years leading to offshoring of certain departments with rather poor results. I noticed the fruit of these decisions years ago when I merely attempted to get XenDesktop/XenApp 6.5 up and running in a lab environment. A quality software product should not require multiple patches to fix critical issues just to get a solution installed. And I’m sure CIOs continue to question a.) the high costs of the software itself combined with b.) the high costs of bringing in consultants or other hired guns just to keep their stuff running. For a smaller or mid-market company without an unlimited budget, this creates a huge incentive to divest themselves of Citrix, and look towards other solutions like VMWare’s Horizon product and “Citrix-lite” alternatives that run on top of RDS.

Which leads me to Microsoft. Fueled by their expansion of Azure as a comprehensive cloud computing platform, they have been investing *significantly* in remote desktop technologies, especially the latest Remote Desktop Protocol versions. Their most recent version of the Remote Desktop Protocol, RDP 8, features incredible improvements over previous versions, primarily in the adaptive graphics department AND in the use of UDP as a transport protocol to vastly increase data throughput and responsiveness over less than reliable links (4G, WiFi, Satellite, etc). While not as bleeding edge as Citrix’s emerging Framehawk technologies in extremely high loss networks, it’s simply *good enough* for the vast majority of corporate networks and teleworking scenarios. And as we’ve seen in the past, once Microsoft gets *good enough* in a certain market / technology area, they tend to dominate. Remember Novell, anyone? 🙂

As for us, we’re charting our path alongside Microsoft. While our software continues to support Citrix and other configurations running on top of RDS, woe be to vendors who are “Citrix only” in their design focus, as I think they’re going to be competing for an ever shrinking piece of the pie. There will be a lot of money to be made over the coming years on migrating people AWAY from Citrix on to pure Remote Desktop Services, and we will be a proud part of that vendor ecosystem.

How To: Monitoring RDP Bandwidth In Real Time and Session By Session

July 13, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

We’ve written at length about how the Remote Desktop Reporter component of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite excels at tracking RDP bandwidth consumption over time and how it is capable of generating many different reports to track this consumption by user or by computer. We’ve also mentioned how crucial it is to apply the recently released Microsoft Hotfixes so that bandwidth data is queryable on a Windows 2012 server.

But, is there an easier way to at least keep an eye on RDP bandwidth without the reporting?

The Growing Importance of RDP Bandwidth Monitoring

It is imperative that admins do something – even if it doesn’t involve reporting – before bigger problems crop up. Now that more and more shops are migrating to Windows Server 2012, it is all the more important to start monitoring RDP bandwidth. Why? Due to vast improvements in the RDP 8.0 protocol, such as adaptive graphics and combined UDP/TCP transport of data, remote desktop data throughput has been greatly enhanced.

And, what does that mean? Much larger amounts of data transferred on average. Therefore, it’s perhaps more important than ever before to stay on top of it.

Reviewing RDP Bandwidth Data In Real Time

In many cases, admins may want to simply review this data in real time, to see on a day-to-day basis which users are transferring the most data. If this is the case, our Remote Desktop Commander Suite offering (at least at first glance) might appear to be overkill.

Not a problem. Our Remote Desktop Commander Lite is perfect for this purpose.

When in session view, Remote Desktop Commander Lite automatically displays total RDP bandwidth transferred in each user’s session. If you click on the RDP bandwidth column, users are grouped sorted from greatest consumption to least consumption.

When arranged in this fashion, it’s easy to spot the outliers. From there, you can message the user to find out what they’re doing and disconnect or reset their session. You can also jump into process view to see what programs they’re running that could be the culprit.

Happy hunting of your bandwidth hogs – please be merciful to your users!

Do you have questions about how Remote Desktop Commander Lite can assist with your RDP bandwidth monitoring needs? Contact RDPSoft or start a conversation below.

Monitoring Remote Desktop Memory Usage in Real Time With Remote Desktop Commander

June 29, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

Of all the critical system resources that must be monitored on a Terminal Server or other Server Based Computing environment, memory usage is one of the most important.

If you’ve worked with Citrix or Microsoft RDS for any length of time, you’ve seen how servers can grow unresponsive when an errant process has a memory leak, which is more common then many might think. The RDP Clipboard applet (rdpclip.exe), which runs in each user’s session, is one of the most notorious culprits in this regard.

Which is why we at RDPSoft always found it odd that the Remote Desktop Services Manager (aka TSAdmin) never had an integrated way of showing memory usage by process, by user, by computer, or by session.

Enter Remote Desktop Commander

We decided to fix that in Remote Desktop Commander Lite, our integrated Terminal Server session and process management utility.

Process Memory Consumption

Rather than attempting to get this information from performance counters with WMI, which can be dreadfully slow, we used low-level native calls in a multi-threaded architecture to return memory statistics with blazing fast speed across systems in your farm.

Peak Process Memory Consumption

More than just current memory usage by process, you can also track peak memory usage by process. This is incredibly important, because sometimes a process temporarily allocates a huge chunk of memory, works with it, and then deallocates it.

However, during that peak allocation, if memory is already running near maximum capacity, this can cause a performance impact on your server. And even if the process goes back to “normal memory use,” you can still get a clue as to how greedy it was with memory at a prior moment.

Memory Consumption Per User, Computer, Session, and More . . .

And finally, reviewing memory consumption per user, per computer, or per session is trivially easy.

View of process memory consumption by user group — Viewing process memory consumption by grouped user

Simply switch into Process View in Remote Desktop Commander Lite, and then click on the appropriate column (e.g. User, Computer, or Winstation).

Voila. Remote Desktop Commander will automatically tally the total memory for each grouping and display it to you.

How Can You Leverage These Capabilities Today?

Trial software for Remote Desktop Commander Lite is available for free, and you can download it right now.

Questions? Reach out to RDPSoft or comment below.

Calculating RDP Bandwidth on Windows Server 2012

March 29, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

As we’ve discussed previously on this blog, we discovered a bug in Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2 some time ago that prevented our software from being able to calculate RDP bandwidth used per RDS user and per RDS session on these operating systems. We kept an eye on it and along the way provided an update on the issue with calculating RDP bandwidth.

A Hotfix From Microsoft

Microsoft worked diligently with us in 2014, and by the end of that year, had released two hotfixes (one for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, the other for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2). These hotfixes are now available for download.

UPDATE: Now, in 2016, these hotfixes have been incorporated into updates for the above operating systems, particularly Windows Server 2012 R2. So, provided your systems are being routinely updated, these bandwidth counters should be functioning again.

Once you apply the above appropriate hotfixes (and/or updates) to your Terminal Server farm, you can then start leveraging Remote Desktop Reporter to track RDP bandwidth consumption in a variety of ways.

A New Family of Reports Targeting RDP Bandwidth

With the release of Version 3.0 of Remote Desktop Reporter, we offer a new RDP Bandwidth report family – Bandwidth Consumption By User.

Remote Desktop Reporter RDP bandwidth report — Report in Remote Desktop Reporter showing bandwidth transferred by user.

This new class of reports can aggregate all of the RDP bandwidth usage by individual users across multiple servers by day, by week, or even by month. It’s great to quickly pinpoint users that are most expensive in terms of the bandwidth they consume. This information also can be useful for MSPs who need to meter bandwidth usage by their clients.

As with all Remote Desktop Reporter reports, it’s easy to filter by user(s), server(s), and/or date and time.

Get Started Today Tracking RDP Bandwidth

So, what are you waiting for? Apply the hotfixes/updates to your Windows 2012 servers, and then start a monthly subscription of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite for only $9 per server per month. In addition to the RDP bandwidth reports above, you will have complete visibility into user activity on your terminal servers, whether it be CPU consumption, memory consumption, session recordings, user time tracking, or even RDP latency/connection quality.

How To Track Levels of Per User SAL Licensing with SPL Tracker

March 7, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

When we brought our Service Provider Licensing Tracker – SPL Tracker – to market in the middle of 2014, we focused first on two of the most common per user Subscription Access Licenses (SALs) that Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have to track – Remote Desktop Services SALs and Microsoft Office SALs.

Comparing Actual Usage and Allocated Usage

Since our companion Remote Desktop Reporter utility continually stores session activity metrics from server-based computing platforms like Microsoft RDS and Citrix XenApp, the SPL Tracker is able to compare actual usage to allocated usage for RDS SALs and Office SALs.

Screenshot of SPL Tracker tracking license usage. — Tracking SAL usage with SPL Tracker.

This capability demonstrates for MSPs the amount of licensing waste for these classes of licenses. It also provides a mechanism to de-allocate inactive users by removing them as a member from domain access control groups.

However, there are many different types of per user SAL licensing that must be accounted for in the Microsoft SPLA program, including those licenses that are not “used” within a server-based computing session. Perhaps the most prominent example is Exchange SALs.

Sometimes You Want to Track Usage, Sometimes You Don’t

Therefore, in version 3.0 and later of our SPL Tracker, we have a new definable license type that does not attempt to track usage of this kind of license.

Screenshot from SPL Tracker 3.0 showing per user SAL licensing capabilities. — Tracking per user SAL licensing with SPL Tracker 3.0.

With this new definition type, MSPs can create additional license types for per user SAL licensing they must report to Microsoft, and then pair up each license type with the Active Directory group that controls access to that class of license. Even though actual usage will not be tracked, as long as the MSP takes steps during their user provisioning process to add them to the correct AD groups according to the licensed services they will be using, our SPL Tracker will show the allocated usage in its automated monthly reports.

Easy Per User Licensing for Tracking Per User SAL Licensing and More

With extremely affordable monthly subscription per user licensing plans, it’s easy to deploy Remote Desktop Reporter with the SPL Tracker in a managed services environment. And, with the money saved by 1) automating license tracking and 2) recapturing license waste, this solution pays for itself in short order.

Want to talk tech on how you can leverage SPL Tracker in your environment? Contact us now and we’ll be happy to discuss the possibilities.