Remote Desktop (RDP) Performance with Windows (Client and Server Settings)

These tips will be beneficial for those, who are experiencing

 

“Poor RDP performance, with windows machines due to less network bandwidths and server loads“

 We need to make the changes to both,

 

"Client Machine" (The system you will be using to connect to the Remote machine) , through MSTSC settings

"Remote Machine" (The machine to which you remotely connects to), through GPO settings.

Client Machine Settings

Here you need to simply tweak the 'Microsoft Terminal Services Client' (MSTSC) settings as below.

Step1: Take Microsoft Terminal Services Client (i.e Start->Run->MSTSC)

 

Step2: Select the 'Display' tab, and choose the 'colour depth' as the lowest (15bit), as shown in the below figure

Step3: Take 'Experience' tab, and 'uncheck' all settings as shown in the below figure.

Note: Optionally we can select 'Font smoothing', if you're not comfortable with the Non-Anti Aliased-'Fonts'.

Step4: This step is optional, where you restricts the resources being shared with your remote computer.

The less the resources being shared, the more will be the performance gain.

 For Audio, Choose 'Do not Play' and 'Do not record' options.

Uncheck all options except 'Clipboard' (which allows copy/paste between our local and remote machines)

Remote Machine Settings

The above settings can only be made (Client side), if we're allowed to use 'Microsoft Terminal Services Client' as the RDP client. In some cases, the infrastructure does not allow the use of 'MSTSC', to tighten the security, and they prefer the use of other 'RDP' clients like 'VMWare View Client' or 'VMWare Horizon View'.

In such cases, you can tweak your remote machine settings using GPO (Group Policy Objects), rather than in the client machine.

Apart from that, more performance optimization settings are available with Remote Machine. So no matter what, we've done with client settings, these remote machine settings, will outweigh them in sheer scale.

 

The steps are briefed below

 

Step1: Open 'Group Policy MMC Snap in', using Start->Run->gpedit.msc

 

 

Step2: Navigate to 'Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Remote Desktop Services->Remote Desktop Session Host->Remote Session Environment'.

Now enable the settings, rectangled in red in the below figure. Configure the settings as below. Limit maximum colour depth = 15bit
Enforce Removal of Remote Desktop wallpaper = true
Optimize Visual Experience when using RemoteFx = (Screen Capture Rate: Lowest + Image Quality: Lowest)
Set Compression Algorithm for RDP data = optimized to use less network bandwidth
Optimize Visual Experience for Remote Desktop Service Sessions = (Visual Experience = Text)
Configure Image Quality For RemoteFx Adaptive Graphics = Medium
Configure RemoteFx Adaptive Graphics = Optimize for minimum bandwidth usage

 



The above settings known to dramatically improve the RDP performance as it reduces the use of network bandwidth and both server/client load on processing the RDP data.

Step3: We can configure the below settings, to restrict the redirection of additional resources between the client/remote machine
If we does not require these resources to be redirected (esp like the Printer attached to the remote machine, we rarely use it for any real purpose. So go and disable the printer redirection)
By setting below options (in red rectangle), we can get more performance. For settings starts with 'Allow...', disable the setting. For settings start with 'Do not allow...', enable the setting.

The above applies for 'Printer Redirection' section as well. Make the settings (in red rectangle) enabled.

Step4: Disconnect and then reconnect to the remote machine, for the changes to be applied.

General Settings

Last but not the least, adjust both your client and remote computer for best performance. This setting can improve over all system performance.
For both client and remote machine, follow the below steps.
Step1: Open Computer properties


 

Step2: Adjust for best performance

Navigate "Advanced system settings"->"Advanced Tab"->"Settings Button"->"Visual Effect Tab".
Select the radio button name 'Adjust for best performance'. Again if you're a fan of 'Anti-Aliased Font' (Clear Type Text), you can choose 'Custom' radio button with only 'smooth edges of screen fonts', checked.

  
 

 

How to Create the Load Balance in Azure

Azure Load Balancer delivers high availability and network performance to your applications.

It is a Layer 4 (TCP, UDP) load balancer that distributes incoming traffic among healthy instances of services defined in a load-balanced set.

Note: Basically Used to load balance your Vms, Web applications and route the traffic based on the NAT rules configured on Load balancer.

    Azure Load Balancer configuration

    Internet-facing load balancing : Load balance incoming Internet traffic to virtual machines.

    Internal load balancing :

•         Load balance traffic between virtual machines in a virtual network,
•         Load Balance   virtual machines in cloud services or on-premises computers
•         Load Balance  Virtual machines in a cross-premises virtual network.

    Forward external traffic to a specific virtual machine.

All resources in the Azure cloud need a public IP address to be reachable from the Internet.

Cloud infrastructure in Azure uses non-routable IP addresses for its resources.

Azure uses network address translation (NAT) with public IP addresses to communicate to the Internet.

    Azure Load Balancer Setup and Configuration

    Login to Azure portal, and sign in with your Azure account.
    Click New > Networking > Load balancer.
    Create load balancer

•     Enter a Name for your load balancer.
•     Select Types Public or Internal.
•     We can use internal load balancers to balance traffic from private IP addresses.
•     Public load balancers can balance traffic originating from public IP addresses.
•     Select the Public IP address and create new Public IP address
•     Select the subscription
•     Create the Resource Group or select the existing Resource Group
•     We can choose the location based out of region.
•     Click on Create .

 

 

We will see the below validation Page and Load balancer will be created with in 5 to 10 minutes.

    Azure Load Balancer  Configuration

Once the Azure Load Balancer is create , Then search for Load balancer then select the load balancer.

Click on Overview:

    Overview :

It will show all the Azure Network load balancer like Backed IP address, Health Probs Load Balancing rule, NAT rules Subscription ID  and other Details.

    Activities Logs:

Activities logs are the just like a events logs of your services or It will show complete activity logs on your Azure Network load balancer .

 

    Access Control (IAM) :

It is Role based access authentication for Network load balancer , If you want some from you team to manage the Network load balancer or you want to restricts the access to other department that you can add that user in IAM and limited the access to particular user.

      Tags:

Tags are name/value pairs that enable you to categorize resources and view consolidated billing by applying the same tag to multiple resources and resource groups.

    Diagnose  and Solve Problem:

It is MS azure Knowledge-base solution , It is collection of common scenarios solution where we can go through the solution and try to fix the issue Common Scenario  are below and more you can find in azure portal.

•      Load Balanced VMs are not receiving traffic
•     VMs behind Load Balancer (LB) not responding to requests
•     ADFS & SharePoint connections fail behind Load Balancer over VPN
•     My issue is not listed

    Azure load balancer Front End Pool:

Front end pool has public IP (PIP) addresses for incoming network traffic

    Back-end address pool:

•     It contains network interfaces (NICs) for the virtual machines to receive network traffic from the load balancer.
•      The virtual machine will be selected in the backend pool should be target for the load balance traffic of this rule.

We can add the Vms in backend Pool as per below mention .

    Single Virtual Machine : We can add the Single Virtual Machine in Backend pool.
    Availability Set: Best Option which Microsoft suggested ,that We will add the Availability set in Azure load balancer which will provide the better reliability and performance for azure Load balancer.

When we will add the availability set , all the Vms will be added automatically as a part of availability set to Backend pool .



We will be able to see the below configuration if we are adding the Single VMs.

Please do set the Vms you want to add the VMs in backendpool.

We can select the Availability Set as per below configuration based on the requirements.

•     Name : As per your organization standard .
•     IP Version: IPv4 or IPv6
•     Associated with Single Virtual Machine or Availability set.

    Health Probes :

Protocol: Load Balancer will work on HTTP or TCP protocol , Please select which protocol you want to route the traffic for your applications .

Port: You can select the port number where you want to allow the traffic  and https port 443 or TCP port 80.

Interval: The amount of time between probs attempts

Unhealthy Threshold: The number of consecutive probe failures that must occur before a virtual machine is considered unhealthy.

    Load Balancing Rule

We can configure the Load balancing rule based on the application requirements.We can enable the below configuration for load balancing.

Interval: The amount of time between probs attempts

Unhealthy Threshold: The number of consecutive probe failures that must occur before a virtual machine is considered unhealthy.

Front End IP address: Client will communicate on load balancer on selected IP address services will have their traffic routes to the target machine by this NAT rule

Backend Port: You can choose to route traffic to the virtual machines in the backend pool using a different port than the one clients use to communicate with the load balancer.

Backend Pool: The virtual machine will be selected in the backend pool should be targeted for the load balance traffic of this rule.

Health Probe: The selected probe used by this rule to determine which virtual machine in backend pool are healthy and can receive load balanced traffic.

Session Persistence: Session persistence specifies that traffic from a client should be handled by the same virtual machine in the backend pool for the duration of a session”None: specifies that successive requests from the same client may be handled by any virtual machine:client IP” specifies that successive request form the same client IO address will be handled by the same virtual machine.
“Client IP and protocol” specifies that successive requests from the same client IP address and protocol combination will be handled by the same virtual machine.
Idle Timeout: Keep a TCP or HTTP connection open without relying on clients to send keep-alive messages.

Floting IP: We recommend using this feature only when configuring a SQL always on availability Group listener . It can be enabled only when creating a rule and if the port and a backed port matches.

    Inbound NAT Rules

Contains rules mapping a public port on the load balancer to a port for a specific virtual machine in the back-end address pool.

Name: Please provide the Name as per your organization Standard .

Frontend IP address: Client will communicate on load balancer on selected IP address and services will have their traffic routes to the target machine by this NAT rule

IP version: The IP version of the front end IP address must match the IP version of the target network IP configuration. Public load balances support IPv4 and IPv6. Internal load balancers support IPv4.
Network IP Configuration: The IP configuration that will receive traffic for the chosen Virtual machine. The IP version of the IP configuration much match the IP version of the front-end IP address.
Port Mapping:By default, traffic is routed to the target virtual machine on the same port that clients use to communicate with the load balancer. You can specify a custom port mapping to route traffic to a different port on the target virtual machine.

Services: We can select the custom services like HTTP, SSH,TCP MangoDB, Cosmos DB etc

Associated to : You can select the VM which you want to traffic should be route first on that Application based on the requirements.

Protocol :Based on your services you need to select the TCP/HTTP Protocol.

Port: Based on your services you need to select the TCP/HTTP port to route the traffic like port number 80 or 443 etc.

Network IP Configuration : It will be by default configure as per your VMs configuration and associated to Vms Internal IP address .

Port Mapping: If we want to Map custom of default port to our application we can select this option or let it  default option selected.

Floting IP  :We recommend using this feature only when configuring a SQL always on availability Group listener . It can be enabled only when creating a rule and if the port and a backend port matches.

Target Port: It will be same port you have configure your application  and you have target the same port for traffic to route between applications.

    Properties :

IT will show where you are resources has been deployed and what is the configuration etc.

    Lock

We can avoid the deleting the services while configuration of lock option.

    Diagnostic Logs:-

It will shows your  application logs and it will help to analyze the issue  and troubleshoot further if there is any problem with the applications.

Resize A VirtualBox Disk

To enlarge a virtual disk in VirtualBox, you’ll need to use the VBoxManage command from a Command Prompt window. First, shut down the virtual machine – ensure its state is set to Powered Off, not Saved.

Second, open a Command Prompt window from your Start menu and change to VirtualBox’s program files folder so you can run the command:

cd “C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox”

The following command will operate on the VirtualBox virtual disk located at “C:\Users\Goud\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 10\Windows 10.vdi”. It will resize the virtual disk to 81920 MB (80 GB).

VBoxManage modifyhd “C:\Users\Goud\VirtualBox VMs\Windows 10\Windows 10.vdi” --resize 81920

(Use two dashes before resize in the command above.)
Replace the file path in the command above with the location of the VirtualBox disk you want to resize and the number with the size you want to enlarge the image to (in MB).

Boot into your virtual machine, and you will realize that the drive still appears as being the same size as before (here, 15GB) !!! It’s normal — this is just because although the disk has been re-sized, the partition is still set up with its original size. We can fix it.

Go to the disk management by doing Start>Computer (right-click)>Manage>Storage>Disk Management.

Right-click on the existing partition you want to extend (here, C:) and choose “Extend Volume” in the pop-up menu.

By default, the Disk Manager will propose that you extend to all the available space, which is what you probably want to do, but you can pick any other size you want. 

And if all goes well, a new look at the C: drive now shows the 40GB we asked for. There you go. You can finally use the extra space!