Remote Desktop Management

How To View Remote Desktop Sessions In 3 Different Ways

April 13, 2021 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

You have likely noticed that viewing Remote Desktop sessions and related details has become increasingly difficult. This is largely a result of some recent developments: There was the overhaul of Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 R2 and later server operating systems. Then, there’s the emergence of Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure.

Microsoft removed the old TSAdmin utility in Windows Server 2012 R2, replacing it with the often cumbersome Remote Desktop Services Manager in the Server Manager utility. It is scarce in detail regarding these sessions, and it does not scale well in larger environments. In addition, attempting to shadow remote desktop sessions with MSTSC often does not work as expected, especially with multiple monitor sessions.

And what about viewing Remote Desktop sessions in Windows Virtual Desktop? Well, you don’t get much of a break there either. Currently, you must use the Windows Virtual Desktop control plane in the Azure Portal, which is even more feature limited than the Remote Desktop Services Manager in Server Manager for classic RDS deployments.

At RDPSoft, we identified these pain points many years ago, and created an assortment of free and commercial solutions to solve these problems. Here are three different ways we’ve made viewing Remote Desktop sessions easier.

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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.

Remote Desktop Commander Lite Is Now Free!

July 6, 2016 By admin Leave a Comment

Greetings fellow Remote Desktop Services and Citrix admins – we hope you’re doing well.

Here at RDPSoft, we’re proud to announce that we’re making Remote Desktop Commander Lite COMPLETELY FREE for everyone in the server based computing community.

Previously priced at $99 per admin, you can now download and use it freely in perpetuity. It’s our gift to you all, and we hope you enjoy it.

It is also our hope that, with the free version of Remote Desktop Commander Lite, Windows Server 2012 RDS admins will no longer have to struggle with Server Manager to perform fundamental, basic tasks like shadowing, viewing connected users, resetting user sessions, terminating hung processes, and sending messages. Now workgroup deployments of Remote Desktop Services or “connection-broker less” deployments can be managed as well!

Moreover, we think that you will enjoy the superset of features found in the latest version of Remote Desktop Commander Lite that are not found in Server Manager or the legacy TSAdmin tool, such as…

The ability to view and monitor RDP latency and connection quality on RDP 8 connections.
The ability to automatically group and sort sessions intelligently by user, computer, activity level, bandwidth consumption, and client OS level.
The ability to add in user-defined, parameterized PowerShell scripts to extend the functionality of Remote Desktop Commander Lite.
The ability to manage RDS connections on any Windows OS level or role, be it Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012, or Windows Server 2016.