Freek Berson, Author at RDS Gurus

About Freek Berson

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So far Freek Berson has created 36 blog entries.

Microsoft HTML5 client for RDS (RD Web Client) reached general availability!

Great news, the Microsoft RD Web Client reached general availability today! This means we can now start using a modern browser to access published Desktops and Applications based on HTML5. We have been following the RD Web Client since very early private preview stages and it’s great to see the 1st release out there now!
An overview of the articles we published on this topic over the past year:

January 2018 – HTML5 client for Microsoft Remote Desktop Services 2016: Remote Desktop Web Client
March 2018 – Microsoft HTML5 client public preview now available!
July 2018 – HTML5 client for Microsoft Remote Desktop Services 2016: Remote Desktop Web Client

The PowerShell CmdLet Install-RDWebClientPackage will automatically download the latest version of the client. I have already updated my lab;

This is the first version of the RD Web Client but the product team is already working on new features and improvements. One of the features we hear requested a lot is the ability to provide direct links to individual RemoteApps. This is referred to as Deep Linking and allows you to add links to for […]

By Freek Berson|July 17th, 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 […]

By Freek Berson|April 25th, 2018|

Book published by Cláudio Rodrigues and Freek Berson

Cláudio Rodrigues and Freek Berson have published a book on Microsoft Remote Desktop Services!

It’s available for pre-order now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/RDS-Complete-Guide-Everything-about-ebook/dp/B07C6849WD

“Microsoft 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 […]

By Freek Berson|April 16th, 2018|

Microsoft HTML5 client public preview now available!

Back in January of this year I published a blog post on the one of the first releases of the Microsoft HTML5 client for Remote Desktop Services (called Web Client). You can find that blog post here HTML5 client for Microsoft Remote Desktop Services 2016: Remote Desktop Web Client. This was based on a preview private that I was part of. I’ve seen huge interest for the HTML5 client, and the client is now officially in Public Preview, ready for anyone to test drive!

All the information you need:

– Set up the Remote Desktop web client for your users

– Access the Remote Desktop web client

An here is a link to the official RDS Team Blog post where the announcement was made:

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2018/03/28/remote-desktop-web-client-public-preview/

Happy testing! If you want more information or help in the setup, feel free to reach out!

By Freek Berson|March 28th, 2018|

HTML5 client for Microsoft Remote Desktop Services 2016: Remote Desktop Web Client

Everyone will be familiar with the Remote Desktop client called MSTSC. Since a few years, Microsoft also has a Remote Desktop client for other platforms like iOS, Mac OS X and Android, available for download from the App Store, the Mac App Store, and the Google Play Store.

As a next step, Microsoft now also has a web client based on HTML5 (currently into preview), called the RD Web Client. This blog post runs through the setup, based on the early preview that I tested. The Remote Desktop Web Client is installed as an extension of the RD Web Access role.

Requirements

The requirements for the Web Client are as follows;

· RD deployment with Gateway, Broker and WebAccess roles all running Server 2016 Operating System. The endpoints (RDSH or Windows Client SKUs) can be running any Windows Operating System starting from Windows 7 SP1 / Windows Server 2008 R2. The client performance will however be better when connecting to Windows Server 2016 or Windows 10 Anniversary Edition or later.

· The RD deployment should NOT be configured to use per-device license.

· The Server 2016 machine hosting RD Gateway role must have this update installed – https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4025334/windows-10-update-kb4025334

· The Gateway and WebAccess […]

By Freek Berson|January 12th, 2018|

RDS Gurus team members presenting at TeamRGE / GeekOut 365 event

Update: Register for this awesome event here!

TeamRGE has teamed up with GeekOut 365 to deliver a live webinar on January 17, 2018. Benny, Kristin and Freek will be presenting several sessions at the event.

"...Planning for the TeamRGE / GeekOut 365 event is in full swing, and though we're still hammering out the final details of the agenda, we're very happy to announce the list of sessions that we'll be hosting during the live webinar this January! Before we get to that, here are the details that we have for you today..."

Date of the event: January 17, 2018
Time: 8:00 AM Pacific, 11:00 AM Eastern, 16:00 UTC (see it in your time zone)
Location: Your desk or living room
Duration: 6 hours
Number of sessions: 20 (including 4 sponsored, 10-minute sessions)
Number of speakers: 16

More info: http://www.brianmadden.com/opinion/The-TeamRGE-GeekOut-365-event-sessions-have-been-selected

By Freek Berson|December 20th, 2017|

Benny and Freek presented at E2EVC in Barcelona!

Last week was Experts 2 Experts Virtualization (E2EVC) Conference time again! This edition was being held in Barcelona. Great location for the 36^th edition of this event with attendees coming from 19 different countries!

Benny and Freek presented a session and in this blog post we want to elaborate some more on what they presented. Our session title was called “Microsoft RDS, current state and future vision”.

When we created the abstract for our session somewhere last summer, we came up with the idea to present a session showing the latest evolution of the Remote Desktop Platform. Back then, we weren’t really sure if we would be able to show it or even be allowed talk about it because back then this was all very early stage. Fortunately, 3 weeks before the E2EVC event in Barcelona we were able to get the bits of the very first RDmi Private Preview and successfully installed it in our labs. We contacted the RDS Product Team and they gave us permission to demo both RDmi and HTML5 at E2EVC last week!

So, during the session we covered […]

By Freek Berson|November 23rd, 2017|

Recap of the session I presented at Microsoft Ignite 2017

Last week I attended Microsoft Ignite in Orlando and on Tuesday I presented a session on hosting RDS and VDI in the Cloud. This blog post is a recap of the session including links to demos I showed.

I started my session with the question whether RDS or VDI would still be relevant today. I pointed out that the application landscape of an average organization today already contains a lot of SaaS and Web based applications. Also, Apps from App stores are becoming more common in the corporate world. These types of applications are already enabled for the modern workplace and can already be accessed from any device at any time. I continued by pointing out the traditional Windows Applications. How these types of applications are not enabled for the modern workplace, that they demand a Windows Desktop to run and that in many cases they rely heavily on an application backend. I talked about how many might argue that the Windows Application will disappear in the future. That the Windows Application will be transformed into other form factors like Web-Based and Apps. I agree with that statement but […]

By Freek Berson|October 2nd, 2017|

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 […]

By Freek Berson|July 7th, 2017|

Azure Resource Manager and JSON templates to deploy RDS in Azure IaaS – Part 8 Defender & BGinfo

Introduction
This article is part 8 in a series of articles on deploying RDS in Azure IaaS using ARM & JSON Templates. Here is a quick overview of previous articles on this topic.

1. Full HA RDS 2016 deployment in Azure IaaS in < 30 minutes, Azure Resource Manager
2. RDS on Azure IaaS using ARM & JSON part 2 – demo at Microsoft Ignite!
3. Video of Ignite session showing RDS on Azure IaaS deployment using ARM/JSON
4. Windows Server 2016 GA available in Azure! – used it to deploy RDS on Azure IaaS!
5. Azure Resource Manager and JSON templates to deploy RDS in Azure IaaS – Part 5
6. Azure Resource Manager and JSON templates to deploy RDS in Azure IaaS – Part 6 RD
Gateway
7. Azure Resource Manager and JSON templates to deploy RDS in Azure IaaS – Part 7 RD Web Access customization

In this part of the series, we’ll add both Microsoft Antimalware for Azure Virtual Machines (Defender) and BGInfo to the deployment.

If you’re not familiar with one of these tools, here is a brief introduction.

What is Microsoft Antimalware for Azure Virtual Machines?
Microsoft Antimalware for Azure Virtual Machines is a real-time protection capability that […]

By Freek Berson|January 17th, 2017|

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