Our Remote Desktop Commander Lite Version 4.8 introduced some features that make managing Windows Virtual Desktop a lot easier and are worth some special attention. Those features include:
- Direct Querying of the WVD Broker For Automatic Host Pool and Host Listing
- Internal (Azure VNet) and External (Outside Azure) Management Options
- Live Profiling of User Experience With the User Input Delay Counter
Dig into those features a bit more below, and keep scrolling for a helpful demonstration video.
Windows Virtual Desktop Broker Integration
In previous versions of Remote Desktop Commander, if you wanted to manage WVD hosts, you had to create a Computer Group first and then import your hosts from your Active Directory domain. No longer – now you only need to launch a simple dialog, enter in your tenant name and WVD admin credentials, and choose the WVD Management Mode (Internal/External) you want to use.
Remote Desktop Commander will then dynamically query the WVD brokers to auto-generate all your host pools and associated hosts in the left hand tree view for you! But wait, there’s more:
Dual WVD Management Modes – Internal and External
When you set up a link to the WVD Broker above, you specify whether or not you want Remote Desktop Commander Lite to operate in Internal or External WVD Management Mode.
Internal Mode gives you the most feature-rich Windows Virtual Desktop management experience. In this scenario, you have installed Remote Desktop Commander Lite on a VM inside the Azure VNet hosting your WVD host pools, as a WVD RemoteApp or on a management VM you will access securely via Azure Bastion. This mode gives you all of the legacy, on-premises Remote Desktop Services management features, including the ability to shadow sessions and provide remote assistance with our Premium Management Features license, query performance counters related to user experience and connection quality, RDP via admin sessions into WVD hosts to do other management tasks, etc, etc.
External Mode gives you a less-feature rich WVD management experience, but does not require Remote Desktop Commander Lite to be deployed inside the Azure VNet with your hosts. You can install it on your own local computer, and still do basic session management tasks like logging off, disconnecting, and messaging users.
Get A Handle On User Experience By Monitoring the User Input Delay Counters Live on Multiple User Sessions at Once
In Windows Server 2019 and Windows 10, Microsoft introduced the User Input Delay counter. Fundamentally, this performance counter tells you how long user input (e.g. keyboard clicks and mouse clicks) sits in the input queue on a RDS or WVD host, until it is received for processing by an application’s message queue. Latency may look fine, but if User Input Delay starts increasing because a WVD host is under load, that could be a sign that user experience is degrading to the point where you want to add more hosts or increase the VM instance size of your hosts.
WVD Management Demonstration Video and Download Link
Take a look at this video that introduced the preview release of Remote Desktop Commander Lite 4.8 with the above features and more:
Curious about next steps and the latest versions? Visit our Download area.
Updated: October 2020.
