RDS modern infrastructure and HTML5 for RDS announced!

Within the RDS MVP group we had already discussed this, and the information is now public! I’m super excited about this step!

RDS modern infrastructure is announced!

“…The RDS modern infrastructure components provide functionality that extends the current RD Web Access, RD Gateway, and RD Connection Broker services, as well as adding a new RD Diagnostics service. The RDS modern infrastructure components are implemented as .NET Web Services enabling a wide variety of deployment options. For example:

Both single and multi-tenant deployments, making smaller deployments (less than 100 users) much more economically viable, while providing the necessary security of tenant isolation

Deployments on Microsoft Azure, on-premises equipment, and hybrid configurations

Virtual machines or Azure App Services can be used for deployment

Azure App Services, part of Azure’s Platform-as-a-Service environment, simplifies the deployment and management of the RDS modern infrastructure because it abstracts the details of the virtual machines, networking, and storage. This simplifies administrative tasks like configuring scale out/in of a service to dynamically and automatically handle fluctuating usage patterns…”

And also, HTML5 for Remote Desktop Services is coming!

“…The web client, combined with the other RDS modern infrastructure features, allows many Windows applications to be easily transformed into a Web-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application without having to rewrite a line of code…”

More details will be shared in today’s session at Microsoft Inspire.

Source: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2017/07/12/today-at-microsoft-inspire-next-generation-architecture-for-rds-hosting/

Real time logging your Microsoft RDS environment using PowerShell

All Remote Desktop Services events logs in a single pane? Every RDS event from machine A and B that has written an event in last 10 minutes? Listen to events from RDS event logs in real time from all RDS related servers in your deployment?

Jason Gilbertson, a Technical Advisor at Microsoft who works closely with the RDS Product team wrote a single PowerShell that does all of the above, and much more!!

Some of the features:

- Export logs locally or remotely to .csv format on local machine grouped by machine name

- Convert *.evt* files to .csv

- View and manage 'debug and analytic' event logs

- Listen to event logs real-time from local or remote machines displaying color coded messages in console

Although the script is very multifunctional, it has specific parameters for RDS to allow you to collect RDS related event log from all servers that are running RDS roles. So, for example, you can combine all event logs from your RD Connection Broker-, RD Web Access-, RD Gateway- and RD Session Host Servers in single view.

The script also exports to CSV which allows you to feed the exports into Excel Graphs or PowerBI environments for further analysis.

A couple of examples;

Query rds event logs for last 10 minutes on a remote RD Connection Broker Server
PS C:\>.\event-log-manager.ps1 -rds -minutes 10 -Machines rdcb-01

Below is what the command outputs to CSV:

Example command to enable ‘debug and analytic’ event logs for 'rds' event logs and 'dns' event logs:
PS C:\>.\event-log-manager.ps1 –enableDebugLogs -eventLogNamePattern dns -rds -machines rdcb-01

Below is what the command outputs to CSV:

Example command to listen to multiple RD Gateway Servers for all eventlogs related to Remote Desktop Services to get live results
PS C:\> .\event-log-manager.ps1 -listen -rds -machines RDGW-01, RDGW-01

Below is a sample output

These were only a few RDS related examples, but the script Jason created has awesome capabilities! It’s available on TechNet Gallery here: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Windows-Event-Log-ad958986