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So far Kristin L. Griffin has created 48 blog entries.
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Ignite Session Now Available! "Get an Independent Insider’s View of Desktop Virtualization and Session Remoting"

Benny Tritsch’s Ignite session is now available here!

ignite

This session highlights Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Remote Desktop Services from the perspective of an independent subject matter expert. Join Benny Tritsch as he shares his experience from real-world RDS projects and his thoughts about the potential Windows Server 2016 has for your desktop virtualization and session remoting use cases. Get in-depth information on how good the RDS 2016 end-user experience is and learn how to measure it yourself, both on-premises and on Microsoft Azure. Other important topics discussed in this session are RDS 2016 management concepts (administrator experience) and the known limits of the pure RDS 2016 platform, leaving room for third-party solutions to build on top.
By |October 3rd, 2016|

New Documentation From Microsoft on RDS Deployment and Upgrade for Windows Server 2016 and Azure

Microsoft is busy at work pushing out some new documentation on RDS deployment and upgrading in Windows 2016 (and much of it is instruction for Azure deployments).  Here is starting point:

 

 

By |September 29th, 2016|

Remote End User Experience Benchmarking for Windows Server 2016 Remote Desktop Services

We’ve got something cool to show you at Microsoft Ignite. If you’re there, make sure you see “Get an Independent Insider’s View of Desktop Virtualization and Session Remoting” (BRK3280) on Friday morning. I think you’ll find it worth your while, as we’re showing you how we can empirically measure the remote end user experience on Windows Server 2016. Using tools that we created, Benny Tritsch, Ruben Spruijt and I did some benchmark testing of Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2016 to learn about the new performance and application compatibility advances in this version of Windows Server. Using the same tools, we can show the results. See for yourself how Windows Server 2016 Remote Desktop Services performs when configured for WARP, RemoteFX and the new Discrete Device Assignment (DDA). And check out the performance of the new Azure N Series VMs configured with DDA.

Why Test on Windows Server 2016?

There’s some new features and capabilities in RDS in Windows Server 2016. Discrete Device Assignment (DDA) is new to Windows Server 2016. RemoteFX in 2016 also has some new capabilities:

  • Support for OpenGL 4.4 & OpenCL 1.1
  • Up to 1GB dedicated VRAM can be assigned to a VM guest
  • Up to 4k resolution […]
By |September 29th, 2016|

Azure RemoteApp Retirement Annouced – Citrix XenApp "express" To Take Its Place

Today Microsoft announced the retirement of Azure RemoteApp: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2016/08/12/application-remoting-and-the-cloud/

Azure RemoteApp will be replaced by a new Citrix offering – Citrix XenApp “express” service – hosted in Azure. The new offering is supposed to combine the simplicity of Azure RemoteApp (ARA) with better app provisioning and delivery, and more monitoring and security features.

I think this is a good move by Microsoft. ARA was a great start and Citrix will build on this and make the V2 of this vision even better. Here are the timeline details that are out now:

  • While new purchases will continue until October 1st, 2016, all support for Azure RemoteApp will end August 31st, 2017.
  • The Tech Preview of  XenApp “express” is expected in Q4 2016, with GA hopefully in early 2017.
  • You can sign up here to be notified when the Tech Review is released:https://www.citrix.com/global-partners/microsoft/remote-app.html.

 Sign up here to join Citrix for a live stream (scheduled for August 23, 2016., 10AM PDT) to learn more about how Microsoft and Citrix are working together to make this next iteration of Azure RemoteApp.

While I have not found any sessions on the Microsoft Ignite agenda specifically about this, I would expect to hear more about this at Ignite.

Lastly, […]

By |August 12th, 2016|Tags: , , |

RD Web Access Feed Is Broken – Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6 To Blame

At a client we noticed that after our last round of patching the RD Web Access web feed broke.  All of our servers run 2012 R2.  The broken feed was evident on Windows 8.1 and 10 PCs/laptops that connected using RemoteApp and Desktop Connection and also on iPads (makes sense because these all use the feed).

Removing KB3098785 fixed this for us (Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6)

Note: Our RD Web Access server is also running RD Gateway. I have not tested whether the RD Web Access feed breaks on a server with only RD Web Access installed.

By |June 22nd, 2016|

Event ID 1000 – Outlook / Lync crashing

I have a customer for whom this is a real pain point so hopefully this will help some of you.

They have an RDS environment with Office 365 (Office 2013) click-to-run. Outlook 2013 for them started crashing all over the place.

We were getting this event in the application logs on all RD Session Host servers:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Application Error
Date:          5/4/2016 3:28:41 PM
Event ID:      1000
Task Category: (100)
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      rdsh.domain.com
Description:
Faulting application name: OUTLOOK.EXE, version: 15.0.4815.1000, time stamp: 0x56e79eae
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.3.9600.18194, time stamp: 0x569515fc
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0001dd93
Faulting process id: 0x58fc
Faulting application start time: 0x01d1a629442c57ad
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\office15\OUTLOOK.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 67ec2891-122e-11e6-8184-00505693f4fd
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

And here is the problem: Lync 2013 (Skype for Business) or Outlook 2013 Crash

The fix for us (we use Click-to-Run) was to revert back to an earlier version, the March version.

Here is the link to walk you through that process: How to revert to an earlier version of Office 2013 or Office 2016 Click-to-Run.

From that article:

Determine and note the previous version number. Use the following Microsoft website to find the update version that is previous to the current version:

[…]

By |May 5th, 2016|

RDMS Problem #1: The Server Pool Does not Match the RD Connection Brokers That Are In It

Working with small and medium sized businesses, we often use the Server Manager’s Remote Desktop Management Services (RMDS) UI to manage RDS deployments.  The problem is that this UI is not without issues. We frequently run into problems using this tool.  Because it bombs for many reasons, we decided to write a series of blogs posts that detail the problems we run into using RDMS and how to fix them.

RDMS Problem #1: The Server Pool Does not Match the RD Connection Brokers That Are In It

Environment:

  • Windows Server 2012 R2 deployment
  • One Session Collection
  • RD Connection Broker is not in HA mode

I opened RDMS and got the message “The Server Pool Does not Match the RD Connection Brokers That Are In It. Errors: 1. Cannot connect to any of the specified RD Connection Broker servers…”

1

 

 

 

 

 

What?  I am using RDMS located ON the RD Connection Broker server! Argh!

Well, my first reaction was a reboot.  No luck.

I opened Services.msc and noticed that the Remote Desktop Management service was not running.  I tried to start it but it failed to start.

Now its time to look deeper. Here is the fix:

I connected to the RDMS database in SQL […]

By |April 5th, 2016|
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