Organizing Servers and VMs in the Remote Desktop Services Manager

When you first start the Remote Desktop Services Manager, it will show you only the local server-not very useful if you're managing a server farm. You can add more servers to the console view in a couple of ways: by creating a custom group (or populating an existing group) or by importing all known farms and pools from an RD Connection Broker.

NOTE: After you add servers to a particular group, they're there unless you manually delete them. You can't drag RD Session Host servers or VMs to a new group, although you can add one server to multiple groups if you wish.

To create a new group, right-click the Remote Desktop Services Manager icon in the left pane and choose New Group from the context menu. In the dialog box that appears, type the name of the new group and click OK. This group will now appear in the left pane.

The Remote Desktop Services Manager starts with one default-and empty-group named My Group. To populate an existing group, right-click its icon in the left pane of the Remote Desktop Services Manager and choose Add Computer from the context menu. This will open the Select Computer dialog box, which you might have seen before when working with the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). From here, you can add computers to the group in one of three ways.

• If you know the name of the server or VM that you want to add to the console, select Another Computer, type the name into the text box, and then click OK. The server will appear in My Group.
• If you don't know the full name but know the letters that it begins with, click Browse. In the dialog box that opens, type the name or partial name of the server or VM and click Check Names. The name will appear in the Enter The Object Name To Select text box with an underline. If you typed the prefix and there's more than one match, then you can pick the right name from a list. (You can't add more than one name at a time.)
• If you have no idea of the name of the server, you'll need to search Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) for it. From the second Select Computer dialog box, click Advanced to search AD DS. Click Locations to specify the organizational unit (OU) that the RD Session Host servers are in and then click Find Now to list all servers in that OU. From there, you can select servers one at a time to appear in the Select Computer dialog box.

Manually populating groups is time-consuming. Operating on the principle that you'd like to manage all the RD Session Host servers and VMs in one or more farms, regardless of their names, you can import server information from the RD Connection Broker. To do this, rightclick the Remote Desktop Services Manager and choose Import From RD Connection Broker. Enter the name or IP address of the RD Connection Broker server from which you want to import and click OK. A new server management group will be created named RD Connection Broker(servername), and groups will be created beneath it named after your farm name(s) or VM pools.

NOTE: When you import VM farms from the RD Connection Broker, it will import the VMs according to their VM names in Hyper-V Manager, not according to their computer names. Because the application programming interface (API) that the Remote Desktop Services Manager and the command-line tools are built on uses the computer name, you must make the VM name listed in Hyper-V Manager and the computer name match to manage VM sessions at all. If you don't, you won't see any activity inside the VMs from the Remote Desktop Services Manager (all tabs will be blank), and you won't be able to connect to the VMs using the Query command-line tools.

After importing the pools and farms into the Remote Desktop Services Manager, you must connect to each server to glean any useful data. This is a one-time process; after this, they will be connected when you open this tool on this particular server or workstation. Rightclick each server and choose Connect. After all servers in each farm or all VMs in the pool are connected, you can highlight the group, user, session, and process data for all servers in the group appear together in the middle console pane. You can also click each server in the group and view just the data for that server.