Greetings friends and current Remote Desktop Commander customers! We’ve just released Version 7 of our Remote Desktop Commander solution. This major release version introduces many new features- such as a brand new DEX (Digital Employee eXperience) dashboard, automated agent service deployments with WinRM, automatic enhanced user activity monitoring (screenshots and window caption recording without login scripts), new improved database management features, and much more.
[Read more…]Remote Desktop Commander v6.5 Now Available!
Greetings friends and current Remote Desktop Commander customers! We’ve just released Version 6.5 of our Remote Desktop Commander solution. This mid-cycle release version introduces new features such as a consolidated RDS Event Viewer and automatic adjustment of monitored session hosts via broker consultation.
[Read more…]Remote Desktop Commander v6.0+ Highlights
The Version 6.0 release of our Remote Desktop Commander solution offered something for everyone – whether using our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite Client or licensed for our full Remote Desktop Commander Suite.
For instance, here are just some of the notable capabilities:
- The Remote Desktop Commander Suite is packed with expanded capabilities – including an extremely powerful Top Level Deployment Status Dashboard that shows you the health of your Remote Desktop Gateways, Remote Desktop Connection Brokers, and Session Hosts all in an interactive window. This dashboard also integrates with our Remote Desktop Canary product to show current RDS login times in your RDS deployment and alert you to any RDP login issues.
- The Remote Desktop Commander Client has been optimized for additional speed and efficiency when it loads collections full of session hosts.
Remote Desktop Commander v5.0 Highlights
Version 5.0+ of the Remote Desktop Commander and Premium Management Features solutions offers something for everyone – whether you use our free Remote Desktop Commander Lite Client, or you have a license for our commercial products. For instance:
- The Remote Desktop Commander Suite now includes a brand new dashboard and report to track CPU usage by application, plus a new Agent Tuning Wizard and Agent Polling Diagnostics report.
- Our Premium Management Features overlay now offers the Client Side Connection Analyzer, which makes it very easy to troubleshoot RDP disconnects and other connection problems that your users experience on their Windows PCs.
- The Remote Desktop Commander Client now displays, sorts, and groups by user session connection time. [Read more…]
Avoiding UDP Transport Gotchas With RDP 8
I’ve been writing and speaking a lot lately about the improvements found in version 8 of the Remote Desktop Protocol, which is used in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Version 10 of RDP was just introduced in Windows 10, and it soon will be implemented in Windows Server 2016, adding some new enhancements over Version 8 which we’ll talk about soon. But back to the topic at hand…
UDP Transport in RDP 8 Boosts Throughput And Enhances User Experience
RDP version 8 is the first generation of the Remote Desktop Protocol that uses UDP alongside TCP for data transmission. Provided the RDP client supports RDP 8 (e.g. Windows 7 with RDP 8 Update, Windows 8, or Windows 10), the Windows 2012 RDSH server can transmit data using both UDP and TCP. This is a big deal, because UDP doesn’t suffer from TCP’s enforcement of its congestion-avoidance algorithm, so RDP 8 can push more data across the wire in a selected chunk of time via UDP (e.g. 2x to 8x more compared to TCP transport only), even over high latency links. Couple that with some nifty forward error correction techniques, and RDP 8 is able to boldly go into sketchy network conditions that previous versions would run screaming from.
But Watch Out For the Following Gotchas That Can Block UDP in RDP 8
Believe it or not, there are several common “gotchas” that can conspire against you to prevent UDP transport use with an RDP 8 or later Remote Desktop Connection. Let’s look at them in order:
Using a Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop Gateway With Windows Server 2012 Remote Desktop Session Hosts
The Remote Desktop Gateway Role Service in Windows Server 2008 does not support UDP transport, so all connections via this legacy gateway will be forced to use TCP only. Not good. Make sure you upgrade your Windows 2008 server running the Remote Desktop Gateway Role Service to Windows Server 2012.
Forgetting to Explicitly Add an Endpoint For UDP in Windows Azure
This one is BIG if you are hosting your Remote Desktop Session Hosts in Windows Azure (or any other cloud service provider for that matter). By default, when you create a new Windows Server 2012 instance (with or without the RDSH role implemented), only the TCP endpoint for RDP will be created. See below:
You’ll need to go back behind any newly provisioned RDSH servers in Azure and remember to explicitly define a UDP endpoint for RDP like so:
Accidentally Disabling UDP Transport Via Server Side Group Policy Objects
One other potential problem is incorrectly setting the “RDP Transport Protocols” Group Policy setting, located under Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Remote Desktop Services, Remote Desktop Session Host, Connections. By default, both UDP and TCP will be used if the client supports it, but administrators can explicitly disable the use of UDP transport in this area.
So, there you have it. UDP transport in RDP 8 opens up so many possibilities in terms of user experience an overall Remote Desktop performance. However, you have to double check and make sure that it’s not being restricted right out of the gate.
