wvd management

TSAdmin Replacement For Server 2012, 2016, and 2019

July 22, 2020 By Andy Milford 1 Comment

For more than 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. The realization starts when TSAdmin.msc isn’t where it’s supposed to be. After a little more research, they discover that the TSAdmin msc isn’t there at all!

For almost everyone, TSAdmin had been the go-to for some of the most common terminal server user session and process management tasks to perform on terminal servers and session hosts in their RDS collections.

This issue of its absence 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.

User Input Delay & More: Highlighted Features in Remote Desktop Commander Lite 4.8+

November 4, 2019 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

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

Manage Windows Virtual Desktop Hosts Just Like Your On-Premises Remote Desktop Services Environment With Remote Desktop Commander Lite

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

Choose the Management Mode You Want Use With WVD, Based on Whether You Have Installed Our Solution Inside or Outside of Azure.

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

Profile User Experience in RDS and WVD With the User Input Delay Counter

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.

Remote Desktop Commander & WVD Management With PowerShell Integration

July 18, 2019 By Andy Milford Leave a Comment

As we’ve shared elsewhere, version 4.7+ of our Remote Desktop Commander Suite supports deployment in Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) tenants.

And much regarding how we handle WVD management has been tuned up since version 4.7 and our subsequent WVD PowerShell integration announcement.

Here, we’ll take an opportunity to drill more specifically into our solution’s integration with WVD and developments along the way in the Remote Desktop Commander Suite.

Product Integration With The WVD PowerShell Management Libraries

As you may already know, the current methods of WVD management are through a set of PowerShell libraries and/or taking the time to deploy Microsoft’s REST API web-based management console. Both approaches have their limitations, and the management features provided in both do not offer feature parity yet with the management features for RDS in the Windows Server Manager.

So, we started wrapping the WVD Powershell management library in our Remote Desktop Commander management GUI. Management actions in our GUI are passed internally to the PowerShell libraries without the admin needing to use PowerShell at all. Moreover, we are offering two modes of management for Windows Virtual Desktop.

Our new beta version dynamically queries the WVD Broker to get tenant host pools and hosts — Our solution dynamically queries the WVD Broker to get tenant host pools and hosts.

Choose the management mode you want to use with WVD, based on whether you have installed our tool inside or outside of your Azure VNet.

Windows Virtual Desktop Management Local Mode

“Local Mode” allows you to install our software INSIDE the same Azure VNet as one or more WVD tenants you manage, and then provides you with full management feature parity we currently offer for traditional RDS deployments. WVD hosts are enumerated from the primary WVD broker service, but then are managed with native APIs from within the local Windows network inside Azure for rich functionality, including shadowing, performance counter access, etc. Admins are encouraged to deploy our management client as a RemoteApp in various tenants OR to use Azure Bastion to access our management tools that have been directly deployed on a VM in the VNet of one or more WVD tenants.

Full management feature parity is available when you deploy Remote Desktop Commander into the Azure VNet where your WVD hostpools are running. — Full management feature parity is available when you deploy Remote Desktop Commander into the same Azure VNet where your WVD host pools are running.

Windows Virtual Desktop Management External Mode

“External Mode” a.k.a “Outside Mode” provides a more limited set of management functionality based on the current version of the WVD Powershell library, such as logging off and disconnecting users, sending notification messages to users, and taking hosts in and out of drain mode. However, in this mode you can run our tool from any system that has Internet access to access the WVD broker service.

A subset of WVD management features are provided, based on wrapped WVD Powershell management libraries, when Remote Desktop Commander is installed outside the Azure WVD VNet.

And there are so many bonuses as well: For example, our software’s ability to automatically install the WVD PowerShell Management libraries for you from the PowerShell Gallery, and the convenient caching of administrative credentials used by those PowerShell libraries.

Perhaps most importantly, our Remote Desktop Commander Management client gives you the power to manage both your traditional on-premises Remote Desktop Services deployments, Remote Desktop Services deployments located in Azure, and new Windows Virtual Desktop deployments all in one interface. It can be instructed to query as many connection brokers or WVD tenants as required for RDS collection and WVD host pool information.

Remote Desktop Commander will automatically prompt you to install the WVD PowerShell Management libraries, and then will do so for you.

Next Steps . . .

Where to next? Find out where to get started and what best fits your needs.

Updated: December 2020.