Windows Server 2012

TSAdmin Replacement For Server 2012, 2016, and 2019

July 22, 2020 By Andy Milford 1 Comment

Over the past 7 years, I have had the privilege of talking to server based computing admins worldwide, discovering the key pain points they must overcome when taking care of their day-to-day management tasks, especially if they manage Remote Desktop Services deployments.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the loss of TSAdmin featured prominently in these discussions. But, more on that in a moment.

The result of these discussions? Remote Desktop Commander. This next step in the evolution of our Remote Desktop Services solution set was developed in direct response to the specific pain points I heard articulated time and time again by RDS admins.

No More TSAdmin in Windows Server 2012

Without a doubt, one of the biggest issues Windows server admins have been dealing with as they migrate from Server 2008 RDS deployments to RDS on Server 2012, 2016, and 2019 is the lack of a simple and powerful RDP management tool. Specifically, a tool that handles some of the most common terminal server user session and process management tasks they need to perform on terminal servers and session hosts in their RDS collections. This issue first came to light with the release of Windows Server 2012, as the former TSAdmin (Remote Desktop Services Manager) utility was orphaned by Microsoft. Terminal Server session management tasks were, in the opinion of many, very poorly integrated into the Remote Desktop Services Manager (RDSM) in the Server Manager program. Moreover, if your RDS collections are more than a few dozen session hosts in size, the Remote Desktop Services Manager can hang and simply will not scale properly.

Remote Desktop Commander replaces TSAdmin on Server 2012 — Managing Server 2012 User Sessions with Remote Desktop Commander

With many admins still not comfortable using PowerShell scripting to do Remote Desktop Services and Windows Virtual Desktop management tasks, the situation has become untenable.

As a result, some admins turned to our free Remote Desktop Admin Toolkit, which was a collection of basic tools that could do limited user session and process management tasks. However, none of these tools were integrated with each other, and their feature set was rather limited.

A Free TSAdmin Replacement for Remote Desktop Services Deployments

As a result, we built an integrated, easy-to-use, and powerful terminal server management utility: Remote Desktop Commander Lite.

Viewing Process Memory Consumption By User on Server 2012 — Viewing Process Memory Consumption by User on Server 2012

The Remote Desktop Services Manager features for Windows Server 2012/2016/2019 that ship with RDPSoft’s Remote Desktop Commander are too numerous to list. Therefore, rather than us “bullet point” you to death, take a look at our video introduction to Remote Desktop Commander on YouTube demonstrating the intuitiveness and power of this utility.

One of the most interesting things you will see in this video is how Remote Desktop Commander can intelligently group related fields, in order to show you things like total memory consumed by user, by server, or RDP bandwidth, for instance. There are also features we provide that were never present in TSAdmin, such as the ability to review RDP latency and connection quality for multiple user sessions at once.

Running Windows Virtual Desktop in Azure? No problem. All of our solutions, including Remote Desktop Commander, also work well inside Windows Virtual Desktop environments. In fact, you can publish our tools as a WVD RemoteApp and use it to manage your WVD host pools from anywhere!

Which Edition of Remote Desktop Commander Do You Need?

Because we know that all of our customers may not need a comprehensive monitoring and reporting solution for their RDS, WVD, and Citrix farms at this time, we now offer several different classes of license:

Viewing Server 2012 session process memory consumption, grouped by heaviest memory consumers.

Remote Desktop Commander Lite – completely free for all RDS, WVD and Citrix farm admins – and it provides you with the ‘TSAdmin like’ session management features you need for day-to-day administration of your Remote Desktop Services, WVD, and Citrix server farms.

Premium Management Features for Remote Desktop Commander Lite – adds a powerful feature superset to Remote Desktop Commander, and overcomes some of the shortcomings in Microsoft’s shadowing technology, giving you a very powerful RMM tool designed specifically for support Remote Desktop user sessions and Remote App sessions. Additionally, it allows you to delegate specific RDS and WVD management tasks to help desk staff across your RDS collections and WVD hostpools without making them admins, which is not available in Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services Manager. It also solves shadowing issues in Citrix, such as the requirement to obtain consent before shadowing, and Citrix Director’s dependence on Remote Assistance. Best of all, it only costs $99.99 per help desk technician or admin per year, which is much less expensive than typical RMM tools.

Remote Desktop Commander Suite – which only costs $9.99 per monitored RDS, WVD, or Citrix host per month – gives you TSAdmin replacement management capabilities outlined above, but also includes:

Our Remote Desktop Reporter utility for historical session user activity, RDS, WVD, and Citrix performance monitoring and reporting, license reporting, connection quality/RDP latency reporting, RDP security (login and login failure) tracking, and session recording
SPL Tracker, which helps MSPs and others automate the chore of Microsoft SPLA and Citrix CSP license reporting

Free Remote Desktop Commander Software

What makes the most sense for you? Remote Desktop Commander Lite, our Premium Management Features overlay, the Remote Desktop Commander Suite, or Remote Desktop Canary? Visit our Complete Monitoring and Management Bundle page to learn more about each product as well as licensing options.

Tracking RDP Bandwidth on Windows Server 2012: First Hotfix Released!

August 14, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

In two previous posts this year (Part 1 and Part 2), we disclosed that due to the integration work related to RemoteFX technologies in Windows Server 2012, it was no longer possible to obtain RDP bandwidth information on a session by session basis on Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.

Microsoft Generates Two Hotfixes

Fortunately, after our identification of this bug and follow-on advocacy, Microsoft agreed to generate two Hotfixes to restore this functionality. Today, with much happiness, we can announce that the first Hotfix has been released and is available for download!

Note well that this first Hotfix only will work on the Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 codebase. There will be a subsequent hotfix released later this year for the Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 codebase.

The Symptoms . . .

In the article ID, Microsoft explains the symptoms corrected by this hotfix:

When you try to use the WTSQuerySessionInformation Remote Desktop Services API function to obtain information about incoming bytes (WTSIncomingBytes) or outgoing bytes (WTSOutgoingBytes) for a Remote Desktop session on Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012, the return value is always zero bytes.

Thanks Microsoft Support and Development Teams!

We’d like to give a hearty thanks to the support and development teams at Microsoft that made this happen. Good job, guys!

Remote Desktop Reporter Helps Gain Insight On RDP Bandwidth Consumption With Windows Server 2012

Now, since this hotfix is available, wouldn’t now be a great time to deploy our Remote Desktop Reporter tool to gain insight on RDP bandwidth consumption in your RDS farm, and find out which users are the heaviest consumers of it?

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

January 28, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

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.