Tad Brockway - Terminal Services team tour

I use it all the time!

At any moment, 24/7, there are a minimum of 3 terminal services (remote desktop) connections open on my machine to remote servers.

same here I have atleast 2 open rdp connections at all times!

It is nice to see some faces of the people who work on rdp

I use Terminal Services to remote support servers over the internet for various customers. It rocks! I use the Remote Desktops for this which is included in Win2k3 Server Admin Tools.

This was quite a intrerstering video. I took that applications just work for granted, never thought about how much work was need to make that happen.

Where does Avalon fit in? I seem to recall a video I watched on C9 a while back which implied that Avalon would enchance the Terminal Services Seesion....OK I typed that while watching the video and scoble asked the question again...

Scoble asked my bandwidth question also!

I first used Terminal Services With windows NT 4.0 and citrix back then people used to quote 30k per session, is that not the case any longer?

Scoble your one step ahead!

Remote applications and remote documents. Way cool.

Another reason to persuade my customers that the upgrade to Vista will be a productivity boost.

30Kb is still a useable amount of bandwidth for a Terminal Server Session, however it is not sufficient for all situations, i.e. if you're using 16/24 bit color, higher resolutions, sound, remote printing & drive redirection the bandwidth required climbs a bit (usually in about 4Kb increments)

Citrix ICA on the otherhand is a bit less hungry for bandwidth (and can be limited by policy).  I monitor ICA bandwidth on my WAN connected sessions and they often stay below 20Kbps, but do spike-up over 100Kbps from time to time.

Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
http://www.workthin.com

Not bad.  I am looking forward to seeing the final product from MS once Longhorn server ships.  It would be nice to be able to run management consoles like Exchange, SQL, etc. seamlessly directly from the actual servers rather than running a local installation of the tools.  Will features like seamless apps be available with the 'remote administration' mode on other regular member servers?

I truely hope that the TS licensing design changes dramatically to mimic the concurrent connection model (Ahem, like Citrix, perhaps ).  2003 and earlier have some annoying issues with administrating and maintaining licenses.  I am a weathered Citrix administrator, and usually see more problems with TS licensing because of the overall design.  I like TS, but it really needs a licensing model overhaul.

TS has come a long way since the first releases of Hydra on NT4.  I know the TS team is working hard to provide more value to the TS core, and I hope that sys admins will be *WOWED* by the new features in the works for Longhorn.

Awesome!!! The one thing I would ask would be an easy way to know that the Window I am working in is a remote window. I think some graphical glyph of some type would do the trick. Just the example of showing how you can remote an Explorer window could cause me some grief (and I understand the concept), imagine how a regular use my feel. Whaddya thing?

Can you find an interviewer that has more experience with the products?  Or at the very least, do some homework and ask better questions.  The use of a screen capture utility would make a wonderful replacement for the Wayne’s World style extreme close-ups of the interviewees screen.  That said, it is good to have faces and voices to associate with the names of the developers.

It is about time that Terminal Services and RDP has made it into the limelight. The server based computing and thin client computing market has been highly underestimated with it recently seeing significant growth over the last couple years.

The features and user experience keep getting better and I am amazed at all the different vertical market success stories I have heard of since 1999. I would agree that some of the common issues are licensing, application not design for multi-user, and general lack of understanding of the features and capabilities.

Robert or Tad - I am interested in finding out from Nadim Abdo what he uses the DT Research 380 WebPad sitting next to the right of his laptop for? Performance testing or browsing the web from his office bar.  Also does anyone from the Terminal Services or RDP team plan on attending the upcoming Citrix iForum show in October?

Regards,
William

Hi William,

Very observant I have a number of RDP client devices scattered around the place for testing and general RDP usage. The WebDT is just one I used to use a few years back as a CE based RDP client. I tend to use a tablet more these days though.

Nadim

Hi Nadim,

 

Thanks for the email back.

 

I am glad to see that you are looking at various devices for your RDP testing. We have some of the 1st WebPADS ever created to the latest embedded devices. Overall I have about 20-30 different embedded devices with various OS’s in my office and more in our thin client and server based computing performance lab (RDP & ICA) which I built about 5 years ago.

 

Hopefully the RDP team has not fully transitioned over to higher performance based devices like tablets and desktops as the main bar for performance testing of the RDP protocol. The market for low power and lower MHz embedded devices like thin clients and hybrids have significantly grown over the last couple years and should be in your test suite for the lower end of the spectrum. Check out the latest IDC enterprise thin client report if you need detailed market and growth information.

 

If you are interested in talking more about this offline you can contact me at my email address in my profile.

 

Regards,

William

Nadim,

Great video. What kind of profiling mechanism you use to safeguard that only AD granted applications are avialable to the users desktop, and how do you check, or does the user has to enter his login each time an application is initated.

Regards

Twan Deibel
Netherlands

I'm writing an app in .net that will run on terminal servers. I've always been curious about how much bandwith my app is taking. Is there any tools out there that I could use to measure RDP bandwidth for each sessions that my server is running.

I noticed some new security settings in the RDP client to use SSL. It would be great if we get to see a video about some of the new security enhancements in the Terminal Services space and RDP 6.0. I somehow feel for the importance, popularity and prevalence of RDP is not adequately reflected in Channel 9. There are only 1-2 videos on RDP/TS!