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Remote Desktop Commander v4 Now Available

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Greetings friends and current Remote Desktop Commander customers! We’ve just released Version 4.0 of Remote Desktop Commander, both the Lite and Suite editions, so we want to tell you what’s new under the hood in terms of features.

In this RDPSoft E-Newsletter:

 

New Remote Desktop Commander 4.0 Features

Introducing RDS Performance Audits, Custom Report Design Work, and White Glove Installation

Our Technology Alliance Partner, FSLogix, Is Simply the Best Solution for Office 365 Deployments Inside RDS, Citrix, and VDI

RDC 4.0 Download and Upgrade Links

New features include:

Pinpoint Historic CPU, Memory, and Other Session Load Bottlenecks on Servers Instantly With “Historical Performance and Load Across the Farm” Dashboard

This Feature Is Present In the Following Editions: Suite
Previous versions of Remote Desktop Commander allowed you to view recent performance metrics across your servers, as well as pull up snapshots of performance for all user sessions given a specific period of time. However, the new Historical Performance And Load Across The Farm Dashboard allows you to scroll through hour-by-hour graphs of when your RDS session host servers were under peak load, in terms of memory, CPU, or session count. The graph is interactive, so you can click on a point of interest, and be immediately transported to another dashboard that shows all of the sessions active in that time frame- so you can review the user session(s) that contributed most to the server load and determine what they were doing at the time.

Historical Performance And Load Across the Farm
Track CPU, Memory, and Session Counts On Your RDS Servers Over Time
Historical Performance And Load Across the Farm (2)
Pinpoint Times of High Resource Utilization on RDS Session Hosts.

Historical Performance And Load Across the Farm (3)

Review Which Users Caused High Resource Utilization
After Clicking On a Timeframe of High Resource Utilization, Immediately See Which Users Impacted the Session Host(s) Most.

Quickly Filter Dashboards By Date Range and RDS Collection Name / Server Groups

This Feature Is Present In the Following Editions: Suite
For organizations with larger RDS deployments, attempting to review all of the session host servers in a single dashboard can get complicated. Version 4 of Remote Desktop Commander allows you to quickly filter dashboards by a 1.) RDS collection name, 2.) user-defined group of RDS servers, and 3.) in some cases, a date range lookback. By doing so, you can keep multiple dashboards up and running inside the Remote Desktop Commander Client, with one dashboard per RDS collection.

Filter Dashboards By RDS Collections
Limit the Scope of Session Hosts Shown in Dashboards By Filtering By Collection Name or Computer Grouping.

 

Filtered Dashboard By Computer Group
A Dashboard With Fewer Elements Filtered By RDS Collection Name / Computer Group

Azure and Standard SQL Server Authentication Support

This Feature Is Present In the Following Editions: Suite
Previous versions of Remote Desktop Commander required use of a local SQL Server deployment with Windows Integrated Authentication. Version 4 now also allows you to use a.) an on-premise SQL server with Standard (explicit username/password) Authentication and/or b.) a Microsoft Azure SQL Server deployment. This provides organizations with the flexibility to create multiple SQL databases for multiple RDS deployments on a single SQL Server, even when each deployment is isolated in a different, non-trusting Windows domain.

Now Use Standard SQL Connections and Azure SQL Connections to Store and Review RDS Data
Now Use Standard SQL Connections and Azure SQL Connections to Store and Review RDS Data

Adjust RDP Permissions on Session Hosts Directly In the Session Navigator

This Feature Is Present In the Following Editions: Lite and Suite

In the summer of 2017, Andy Milford, CEO of RDPSoft and Microsoft MVP in the Remote Desktop Services category, released the beta version of the new free tool called RDSConfig at the PureRDS.org resource site he maintains. Just as TSAdmin was removed from Windows Server 2012, TSConfig was similarly removed, making it very difficult for RDS admins to adjust the RDP permissions on session hosts. This has prevented many organizations from being able to delegate certain RDS management roles to non-admin users, such as shadowing users for support purposes. In Version 4 of Remote Desktop Commander, this tool has been integrated into the Session Navigator area of both the Lite and Suite versions. Now admins can easily view and adjust RDP permissions on their session hosts any time they wish.

GUI to Adjust RDP Permissions
View and edit RDP permissions directly inside Remote Desktop Commander.
Adjusting RDP Permissions Granularly
Use the RDSConfig utility to view and adjust RDP permissions on your session hosts.

Speed Improvements and Other Bug Fixes

In version 4 of Remote Desktop Commander, we have optimized many SQL queries to speed the retrieval of historic performance data to the Client. Also, we have repaired a few bugs, including one that affected the ability to record screenshots from multiple monitor sessions in certain instances.

New RDS Consulting Services: Schedule an RDS Performance Audit, Request Custom Reports, or Schedule White Glove Installation

2017 was a great year for RDPSoft, and to celebrate our continuing growth, we’re now pleased to offer additional services to go along with our Remote Desktop Commander Suite solution.

  • RDS Performance Audit

    • Administrator time is at a premium these days. Often, you may know there is a performance issue with your RDS farm, but you don’t have the time to figure it out on your own. Let RDPSoft do that for you. We will install our Remote Desktop Commander Suite software in your environment, and then gather up key performance metrics, including data from RDS-related event logs and installed Hotfixes. After gathering data for a week, we will build a comprehensive report that benchmarks performance in your farm and offers suggestions on how to improve it. You don’t even need to have your own instance of Microsoft SQL available for data collection – we can provide you with a secure connection to an Azure SQL database as part of this service. For more detailed information, and to request a quote, click here.

  • Custom Report Design

    • Do you need a report that’s not available out of the box? Let the RDPSoft team build that for you. Using the free Microsoft Report Builder tool, we can design custom SQL queries and RDLC templates that connect into our Remote Desktop Commander database. Click here for more information and to request a quote.

  • White Glove Installation

    • For only $99, an RDPSoft technician will establish a remote support session with you and install the Remote Desktop Commander Suite software. This service includes a.) installing the software, b.) linking it to a SQL Server Express, SQL Server, or Azure SQL database, c.) adding session hosts / workstations for monitoring, d.) verifying that data is being collected properly, and e.) verifying that the data is displayed properly in reports and the Remote Desktop Commander Client. Click here to purchase this service and schedule a time with an RDPSoft support expert.

Rolling Out Office 365 in RDS, Citrix, or VDI? FSLogix Is Your Lifesaver.

If you attempt an Office 365 deployment inside a virtualized environment, including RDS and VDI, you will be hit with lots of snags. Our technology alliance partner, FSLogix, pioneered the solution to these issues, and they remain the best solution in the market for virtualized Office 365 roll outs. Please read this wonderful article and product comparison that details why they remain the best-of-breed solution.

Remote Desktop Commander 4 Download and Upgrade Links

If you are an existing Remote Desktop Commander SUITE subscription licensee and/or active maintenance agreement holder, click here to request upgrade instructions.

If you are an existing Remote Desktop Commander LITE user, click here to download the latest version, which you can install directly over previous Remote Desktop Commander Lite versions.

If you’d like to learn more about the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, including its feature set and how to start a subscription for only $9.99 per server per month, click here.

Avoiding UDP Transport Gotchas With RDP 8

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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:

RDP UDP Endpoint Missing

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:

RDP UDP Endpoint Defined

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.

Want to find out more about what transport protocols your clients use, bandwidth consumption, and connection quality? Click here to learn more about the Remote Desktop Commander, and start a $9 per server per month subscription to profile all of the above, plus much more.

Preventing Remote Desktop Logins For Privileged Users

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Recently, I was working with a client who had the interesting goal of preventing a specific domain administrator from logging on via Remote Desktop Services. They wanted the domain admin and other privileged accounts to only connect via the VMWare vSphere console (through the corporate firewall), and then start a console session.

Fortunately, this is easily accomplished via user rights assignments in Group Policy / Local Security Policy. To do this, open up your Group Policy editor, or, if on a non-domain system, launch secpol.msc, and adjust the “Deny logon through Remote Desktop Services” policy entry.

Deny Logon Via Remote Desktop Services

Deny Logon Via RDS

Add the users who you want to prevent from logging on via Remote Desktop Services, save, and then apply/refresh the policy and test.

Note that this works well in all scenarios, from Windows Server 2003 onward. There is an older setting for individual users in Active Directory user management called “Deny this user permission to logon to a Remote Desktop Session Host Server.” This setting worked in all scenarios back in Windows Server 2003. However, in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012, it only works when the RDSH server is configured in Application Mode, NOT Remote Administration mode. Only setting the “Deny logon through Remote Desktop Services” user right assignment in Group Policy will effectively block access across all RDSH modes.

For more, read this Microsoft support article.

Is This The Absolute Surefire Way To Prevent Those Remote Desktop Logins? Well . . .

So, the above would not prevent an Administrator from altering a Group Policy object to remove themselves from this policy restriction. Therefore, using a tool like our Remote Desktop Commander Suite to audit privileged user sessions is a smart idea.

Using Remote Desktop Commander in conjunction with Group Policy, you can turn on heightened session auditing for specific users, routinely creating session recordings and screen captures for review later.

Quite a bargain for only $9 per server per month, if we do say so ourselves.

Calculating RDP Bandwidth on Windows Server 2012

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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.

 

Tracking RDP Bandwidth on Windows Server 2012: An Update . . . Is a Hotfix On The Way?

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A few weeks ago, in a blog post titled Want to monitor RDP bandwidth by user on Windows Server 2012? You’re out of luck…, we exposed the fact that the API function calls and Performance Counter metrics that used to provide per session RDP bandwidth consumption no longer worked and/or had gone missing.  At that time, we speculated that this was a result of “plumbing changes” to the Remote Desktop Services code base to add greatly enhanced RemoteFX support in Windows Server 2012.

We finally have more information, and if you need to reliably track RDP bandwidth consumption by client or by session, you’ll want to read on . . .

RemoteFX Plumbing Woes

It turns out, we were right. 🙂

Windows Server 2012 Plumbing Changes Affect Tracking RDP Bandwidth
The plumbing changes that occurred in the Remote Desktop stack in Windows Server 2012 dramatically impacted the ability to track RDP bandwidth.

After much back and forth with a highly professional Microsoft support representative, it was determined that the plumbing changes in the Remote Desktop stack to enhance RemoteFX in Windows Server 2012 were so massive (including moving whole chunks of code out of kernel mode into user mode), they effectively nuked the old API calls and Performance Counters.

Now, as has been mentioned by the distinguished Shawn Bass of the RDS MVP community, there are some new RemoteFX related performance counters that look at bandwidth.  However, these counters look at rate only, and only at bytes transferred/received in the last second.

Therefore, they do not function as before, nor are they a substitute for the old “total bytes transferred/received” counters, because they are not stateful over the life of a particular RDS user session.

Potential Pitfalls Polling Stateless RemoteFX Performance Counters For Bandwidth Data

In order to get anything approaching a total bytes transferred/received count, you literally would have to poll these counters every second, which presents many pitfalls.

  • Dependence on WMI for this data.  Not highly scalable, nor particularly reliable, in our opinion.  Don’t just take our word for it though.
  • Significantly increased bandwidth required during polling.  Pulling multiple performance counters every second over the network adds up quick.
  • No tolerance for any missed polling of data.  Miss a few seconds here or there due to a blip on the network, or the inability to access the counters for whatever reason?  That stateless data is gone, forever, and now your bandwidth tally is inaccurate.  Bad, bad news if you’re an MSP or SaaS provider actually trying to bill or meter users based on bandwidth transfer.

Of course, this doesn’t even cover the tedium of trying to match up the underlying user with a particular Winstation name.

A Hotfix On The Way?  You Might Want To Wait On The Windows Server 2012 Upgrade If You Wish to Track RDP Bandwidth Consumption

Fortunately, there is some good news (for now).  To their credit, Microsoft’s support department has agreed to file for a Hotfix to restore stateful, per-session aggregation of bandwidth metrics back through the API.  The actual release of a Hotfix is by no means assured, as it has to go through multiple levels of approval by the folks in Redmond.

In conclusion:  If you are an MSP or SaaS provider that needs to reliably track RDP bandwidth consumption by client or by session, stay at Windows Server 2008 R2 for a little longer.  This issue, in our opinion, combined with some continued challenges around RemoteFX (which we will write about later), warrants a period of watchful waiting as the Windows Server 2012 offering fully matures.

As soon as we receive word on whether or not the Hotfix will actually be developed, we will update our readership promptly.

In the meantime, if you are an MSP or SaaS over Remote Desktop vendor and would like to find out more about how our Remote Desktop Reporter tool can help you, click on the links above for more details, or contact us by phone to discuss your needs in more depth.

From the RDPSoft Blog

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