Remote Desktop 2008 R2 - Remote Control Question (Slow over the WAN?)

albanga

Hi All,

This may sound like a really silly question but we recently moved our company to Server 2008 R2 and all our users connect into our network via remote desktop. We have a farm of 4 RD servers (virtualised) all with high specs located at head office.
We have 13 remote sites connecting into our server farm at head office.

One of our remote users has complained about slowness so i checked to see what server they were located on. The server resources were totally fine so i ran a remote control into their session to see the "slowness" first hand and it was definitely slow. It was basically drawing the screen every time the user switched a window. Pretty much unusable. I was able to clearly witness this is the remote control session.

I then called another user who was located in head office working of that same server and ran a remote control session to their system and it was super fast. Like working of a LAN

Finally i called another user on that particular server who is in a different remote site and ran a remote control and their session was fast but not as fast as the head office user. Still totally fine to work off though.

So my question is, if im based in head office and the server is based in head office, when i run a remote control to a user who is in a remote office, would i be affected by the WAN connection during the remote control session? My understanding has always been that because I am in the same site as the server that even if the remote user was experiencing slowness as a result of a WAN connection, i would not see that when in the remote control session??

I hope that makes sense. But just to iterate, when running a remote control session over the WAN, are you seeing exactly what the user sees in terms of speed?

arwes

In my experience, no. Granted, we're still using Server 2003 but we've noticed similar issues. We have a branch office that had a site to site VPN going over a cable modem connection and we could shadow their RDP session and type into notepad and ask them to let us know when the words popped up on their screen and there was a several second delay. It was near instantaneous for us in the home office. We've since moved to a dedicated point to point T1 for that site and they've been happy ever since. We looked at some "RDP accelerator" products, but they just weren't cost effective for us (it's like pulling teeth to purchase IT products).

About7Narwhal

I wouldn't think so. Even if the user is connected via WAN, you are remoting into the box they have RDP-ed into, not the physical machine they are on. That is assuming they are on thin clients. A slow draw might be a client issue and not a speed issue. I would take a look at whatever the user is RDP-ed into and see if THAT is slow, not the connection. Again, all of this is assuming a thin client.

hoktauri

Have you checked the connection between the site and your server? RDP doesn't seem to take that much bandwidth, about 50kbps per connection, but if you have quite a few hitting it at the same time through a bad connection it could do that.

ChickenNuggetz

I've worked with RDP a lot at a previous position, a couple things to check:

• Make sure her connection to the internet is reliable, i.e. try to have her hard-wire in vs. wireless
• Make sure her session bandwidth in Remote Desktop Connection isnt set at something low like 56kbps
• Make sure she has things like Desktop Experience/theme turned OFF (uncheck the box)
• Make sure she's using the latest version of RDC (if not, its a free download from MS)

If she's using a Mac, there are known issues with RDC client for Mac, I'd suggest trying something else like CoRD.

albanga

Thanks for all the great replies.

The connectivity issues the user having is sort of separate to the question i am asking though. I know that particular site has some connection issues and we are currently working on having these resolved. My question was more focused around how i view that users session via a remote control session.

I have tested this more thoroughly and i do think indeed that in Server 2008 R2 you view exactly what the user views. In Server 2003 if i remote controlled into a remote users session and they were on a bad connection complaining of slowness and screen drawing, then i would not see this. My remote control session would be super fast as i was in the same site as the server.

However as far as i can tell that in Server 2008 R2 when you remote control a remote site who has a bad connection, you view their screen as they do. Even though you are on the LAN with the servers, the remote control session comes through as the remote site is viewing it.

Very odd that it is like this but i can assure you it is.