I have posted several blog entries about what is coming up in Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services. Now, you can hear the official information directly from Microsoft’s Tad Brockway. Tad is a program manager for Terminal Services and has been in the Terminal Services department at Microsoft almost as long as Terminal Services has been around. In a 2 part video series, Tad talks about the new features in Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services and demonstrates installation, configuration, and usage scenarios of these new features.
Meet the Terminal Services Team Episode I…
Meet the Terminal Services Team Episode II…
Technorati : Load Balacing, RDP, Remote App, RemoteApp, Session Broker, TS Gateway, Terminal Services, Windows Server 2008
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Documentation is a necessary evil for a system administrator. Not a lot of people actually like doing documentation. Fortunately, there are some free tools to help you document you Citrix Presentation Server Farm settings. Two of the available free tools that will do most of the documentation work for you are called CPS Farm Inventory and Citrix PS4 Documentor. Wilco van Bragt recently reviewed both of these tool on his website. Wilco gives pros and cons as well as some example screen shots.
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Technorati : Citrix, Documentation, Inventory, MFCOM, automation
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If you allow your users to browse web pages in a Citrix Presentation Server session, then you have undoubtedly come across the Adobe Flash problem. Web pages that have Adobe Flash movies are “choppy” and consume a lot of bandwidth. Fortunately, Citrix introduce some SpeedScreen enhancements for Flash in Presentation Server 3.0. Unfortunately, these settings may not be optimized out of the box for you environment. There are, in fact, some “secrets” to optimizing Adobe Flash for your environment. Derek Thorslund has posted some of these secrets in his blog. Some of these secrets include setting audio quality, hotfixes, queuing and tossing, etc. Be sure to check out Derek’s posts to discover these Flash optimization secrets.
Secrets of Optimizing Flash Performance - Part 1
Secrets of Optimizing Flash Performance - Part 2
Technorati : Adobe, Citrix, Flash, Presentation Server, SpeedFlash, SpeedScreen
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When troubleshooting Citrix Web Interface or Program Neighborhood Agent issues, it is a common practice to re-create the production environment in a controllable test environment. But, what if your production environment contains expensive hardware load balancing equipment? It is often not feasible to have this expensive hardware available in a test environment. This is the situation Nicholas Dille recently ran in to while attempting to reproduce an error. Nicholas came up with a neat solution that he shared on his blog. With a little virtualization and some scripting, you too can have a virtual load-balanced test environment.
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Technorati : Citrix, Load Balance, Program Neighborhood Agent, Web Interface, Web Server
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Citrix recently showed off Project Pictor at the Citrix App Delivery Expo (iForum). Project Pictor allows high-end 3D applications to be delivered via ICA. In the past, this was possible, but unusable due to the “jerky” motion of the 3D rendering and rotation. Project Pictor eliminates this limitation by using high-end graphic processor cards to offload graphics processing to the hardware. This makes delivering 3D applications over ICA a reality - even to thin clients. Just keep in mind that Project Pictor takes quite a bit of extra equipment per Presentation Server to pull this off.
You can see this in action in a video hosted at DABCC.com. Be sure to stay tuned to the end of the video to see how Citrix “uses” this technology internally (although I’m not sure Quake 3 counts as productivity software).
Technorati : 3D, CAD, Citrix Presentation Server, OpenGL, Pictor
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Green computing is a hot topic these days. Just doing a search on Google for green computing returns more than 350,000 results. Citrix has announced a new project called “Citrix Power Smart” that helps with green computing initiatives. Basically, what Citrix Power Smart does is power off servers during non-peak hours defined by a schedule. Ruiguo Yang states more in a blog post, “Just imagine you have 10 presentation servers. During the business hours they are fully utilized. However at nights or on weekends hardly anyone connects to them. These servers however still consume power needlessly during such “off business hours”. Simply powering off such servers during “off business hours” can save you up to 30-50% of your presentation server farm power consumption based on our rough estimate…”
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Technorati : Citrix, Presentation Server, energy, green computing, power consumption, power saving
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There are a lot of changes happening in Windows Server 2008. Among those changes are how you connect to servers via remote desktop. One of my favorite switches for remote desktop is /console. I use this switch all the time to connect to the console (session 0) of servers to perform administrative tasks. Guess what, /console is gone in Windows Server 2008. So, what happens if you use this switch in Windows Server 2008? The Terminal Service Team recently posted an article that contains scenarios as well as why the /console switch was deprecated. Here is an excerpt from the article describing the behaviors:
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Scenario
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Behavior
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You type mstsc.exe /console at the command prompt, and then connect to a remote server that does not have Terminal Server installed.
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The /console switch is silently ignored. You will be connected to a session to remotely administer the server.
(For more information about the Windows Server 2008 behavior, see the “Behavior when you connect to a server that does not have Terminal Server installed” section of this article.)
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You type mstsc.exe /console at the command prompt, and then connect to a remote server that has Terminal Server installed.
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The /console switch is silently ignored. You will be connected to a standard Remote Desktop session that requires a Terminal Services client access license (TS CAL).
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In the RDC client UI, you specify Computer_name /console in the Computer box (where Computer_name represents the name of the remote computer to which you want to connect), and then click Connect.
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You receive the following error message:
“An unknown parameter was specified in computer name field.”
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In the .rdp file, you specify /console in the “full address” property, and then try to start the Remote Desktop connection.
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You receive the following error message:
“An unknown parameter was specified in computer name field.”
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In the .rdp file, you specify the “connect to console” property, and then start the Remote Desktop connection.
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The property is silently ignored. You will be connected to a session that requires a TS CAL.
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As a developer, you programmatically call the put_ConnectToServerConsole function or the get_ConnectToServerConsole function of the IMsRdpClientAdvancedSettings interface.
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The function fails, and returns S_FALSE.
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Technorati : Longhorn, RDC, RDP, Remote Dekstop, Server 2008, Terminal Services, Windows
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Last year, Citrix “officially” started blogging via www.citrixcommunity.com. Today, this site has changed from an aggregate news site in to more of a Citrix employee blog site. The site’s description states, “Want to know the latest from the people who build Citrix products? Visit the Citrixcommunity.com Blog site and hear from the developers, engineers, product marketing managers, product managers and Citrix executives building application delivery infrastructure technologies. More than just an inside view to all-things-Citrix, this is a market conversation on server virtualization, desktop virtualization and application virtualization. Join the conversation and make your voice heard. We look forward to your thoughts.”
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Matt Hester recently posted a screen cast on TechNet giving an overview of the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Gateway monitoring and auditing capabilities. This screen cast shows how the Terminal Services gateway logs information to the various event logs and how to use the built in event log filtering tools to find specific Terminal Services information. The screen cast also gives and overview of monitoring connections made through the Terminal Services gateway.
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Technorati : Auditing, Event Log, Monitoring, Terminal Services, Windows Server 2008
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Daniel Petri recently wrote an article explaining display data prioritization in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services. Daniel writes “Display Data Prioritization in Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services allows for automatic control over the virtual channel traffic that is passed between the client and the server. This enables better performance and user experience because display, keyboard typing, and mouse movement data is given a higher priority over other virtual channel traffic, such as printing, clipboard operations or file transfers. This prioritization is designed to ensure that your screen performance (user experience) is not affected by bandwidth intensive actions, such as large print jobs.”
By default the prioritization ratio is 70:30 - meaning 70% of the available bandwidth is prioritized for display, while the everything else has to fight for the remaining 30%. If you feel that this ration isn’t right for your environment, you can tweak the following registry key:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermDD
Valid values are:
- FlowControlDisable
- FlowControlDisplayBandwidth
- FlowControlChannelBandwidth
- FlowControlChargePostCompression
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Technorati : Bandwidth, Display Settings, Longhorn, Registry Tweak, Terminal Services, Windows Server 2008
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