Load Balancing Terminal Services and an intro to ThinManager

If you think about Terminal Services and the core functionality that terminal services provides (remote desktop), the ThinManager platform extends that core functionality. What I mean by that, is that it introduces configuration management, rapid thinclient deployment/replacement, and incorporates high-end features (like load balancing, and fail-over) into a platform that is maintainable. What's also interesting about ThinManager is that it doesn't necessarily require the degree of specialized skill-sets that a platform like Citrix Metaframe/XenAPP requires. In short, it's interesting.

I bring this all up, because I've recently been working with ThinManager. While the platform perhaps caters to manufacturing - it isn't necessarily exclusive to that market. If load balancing is your only problem, there are many ways to handle that. But ThinManager has an interesting way of approaching the problem, and has a host of mature features that help to make it an attractive option. From just a load-balancing standpoint, ACP's SmartSession technology looks at the utilization of your terminal servers before placing new connections on a given server. While that's clever, right off the bat it's doing more than round-robin DNS, or NLB with less complexity, and probably less configuration effort. While ThinManager might not be the only load-balancing game in the town, it's a capable one - and if you're in need extending the core functionality of terminal services, or might benefit from the other features included in ThinManager - you might want to check it ou

As I work more with the platform more, I'll include some more posts.

VMware: Sound Support for remote desktop client and/or thinclients?

VMware ESX/ESXi does not have a virtual sound card device emulated. So there's no direct support for sound within VM's running on ESX/ESXi hosts. However, sound can be played on the remote desktop client if you've set your client to redirect and play locally (assuming your thinclient/remote desktop session supports sound). Keep in mind that if you have a Terminal Server, you need to enable the "Allow Audio Redirection" within the group policy for that machine.

Group Policy>Local Computer Policy>Computer Configuration>Administrative templates>Winows Components>Terminal Services>Client/Server data redirection>Allow Audio Redirection.

TS/RDP: *.RDP connection settings file

Have you ever taken a look at an RDP connection file? You know, the settings file for connecting to a Terminal Server or RDP session? Well, a while back I needed to connect to a box at some non-standard resolution/pixel size, and played around with the settings in the text file (specifically, desktopwidth:i800, desktopheight:i:600).

The other thing I noticed was that, at the time, there was very little documentation on this. Since then, I’ve come across a good resourcefor editing this file a bit, and wanted to link this up in my blog.

If you’re not sure of what I’m talking about, go ahead and fire up mstsc (start>run>mstsc, general tab, save as). Create a new connection, and save it as an .RDP file. Then, using a text editor, check out the file.

Using an ascii file for storing program settings?

very *nix.