Wednesday, April 25, 2018

New Remote Desktop Session Host performance counters to diagnose app performance!

New performance counters for the RD Session Host role are available for the latest Windows Server 2019 preview release!

“…One of the most difficult problems to diagnose is poor application performance - the applications are running slow or don't respond. Traditionally, you start your diagnosis by collecting CPU, memory, disk input/output, and other metrics and then use tools like Windows Performance Analyzer to try to figure out what's causing the problem. Unfortunately, in most situations this data doesn't help you identify the root cause because resource consumption counters have frequent and large variations. This makes it hard to read the data and correlate it with the reported issue. To help you more quickly solve your app performance problems, we've added some new performance counters (available through the Windows Insider Program) that measure user input flows…”

“…The User Input Delay counter can help you quickly identify the root cause for bad end user RDP experiences. This counter measures how long any user input (such as mouse or keyboard usage) stays in the queue before it is picked up by a process, and the counter works in both local and remote sessions…”

“…The User Input Delay counter measures the max delta (within an interval of time) between the input being queued and when it’s picked up by the app in a traditional message loop, as shown in the following flow chart…”

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“…The following graph shows readings for users working remotely in Microsoft Word. In this case, the RDSH server performance degrades over time as more users log in…”

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Source: Use performance counters to diagnose app performance problems on Remote Desktop Session Hosts

Here is a link to the RDS Team Blog announcement about this:
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2018/04/25/new-performance-counters-diagnose-user-application-responsiveness-on-remote-desktop-session-hosts

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Co-authored a book on Remote Desktop Services!

Cláudio Rodrigues and I have published a book on Remote Desktop Services. We’re proud to announce it’s available for pre-order on Amazon today!

RDS - The Complete Guide: Everything you need to know about RDS. And more.

61Lvlt82g8LMicrosoft Remote Desktop Services, or RDS for short, is a complete platform for remote application delivery, on-premises or in the cloud. Several well-known products like Citrix XenApp, VMware Horizon and Parallels RAS use RDS as their foundation. This book covers everything you need to know to deploy a properly configured Microsoft RDS environment, based on Windows Server 2012 R2 and up, using the Remote Desktop Session Host as the platform where the users' applications will run. Deploying, managing, troubleshooting, monitoring, printing, connecting, every single item is there, explained in very detailed step-by-step guides by long time Microsoft MVPs for Remote Desktop, Cláudio Rodrigues and Freek Berson, both having deployed RDS based solutions for hundreds of customers worldwide. If you are considering migrating from Citrix or other competing products and you want to learn everything about RDS and more than that, learn it the right way, this is the book for you. Companion books covering Windows Server 2016 RDS, Windows Server 2019 RDS and the new RD Modern Infrastructure, RDmi for short, will be available shortly after this release.

Also check out these companies that have contributed to this book as well: