Remote Desktop Services

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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RDPwned: A Guide To Securing Microsoft Remote Desktop Services

April 7, 2020 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

After over a year of research, my book on how to secure your RDS environments was published. Teleworking was increasingly being relied upon as this book was in the works, and now teleworking appears to be here to stay for many.

RDPwned - A Guide to Securing Microsoft Remote Desktop Services — Click here to purchase the Amazon Kindle edition for only $9.99 USD

Therefore, given how many of you are standing up new Remote Desktop Services deployments or expanding existing ones to facilitate teleworking, it’s imperative to stay focused on RDS security. Hackers and APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) teams are always hard at work. Don’t unwittingly let them in.

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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.

Version 4 of Remote Desktop Commander Almost Ready!

December 14, 2017 By admin Leave a Comment

Hello friends and existing customers! We’re excited to let you know that the release of Remote Desktop Commander v4 is just about ready, and wanted to give you a sneak peak of all of the new features it contains.

We will be releasing Version 4 shortly after the start of the new year, along with a small price increase – our first price increase in over 18 months. If you’d like to test drive a release candidate of version 4, please complete the form here and mention that you want to try the release candidate of Version 4 in your comments.

New Remote Desktop Commander 4 Features

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

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 you will immediately be transported to another dashboard that shows you 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.

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

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 an 1.) RDS collection name, 2.) a 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

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

Other Performance Improvements

In addition to the features listed above, we’ve made many other performance improvements and bug fixes in this version. Stay tuned for our official launch announcement shortly!

Repping RDS at Techmentor 2017

August 13, 2017 By admin Leave a Comment

Check out our CEO Andy Milford speaking at last week’s prestigious Techmentor event, at Microsoft’s renowned Redmond Campus.

This was Andy’s second straight appearance as an expert speaker at Techmentor – this year giving back-to-back talks on the topics of Remote Desktop Services in Window’s Server 2016, as well as alternatives to Azure Remote App.

RDS and Citrix enthusiasts also had the opportunity to break bread with Andy at the “Bird’s Of A Feather” luncheon.

Watch our blog or follow our twitter @RDPSoft for upcoming posts with highlights from these talks!