World of EUC

something like this? <https://download.parallels.com/ras/v16/docs/en_US/Parallels-RAS-Scalability-Testing-Login-VSI.pdf>

Just had a phone call with Parallels -&gt; Confirmed what I have written above

FWIW - We back apps with multiple groups and then populate those groups with VMs from a single RDSH template. Update the template. Then drain a group, recreate VMs, and repeat.

Updating (Maintenance Mode) the template only works for one group of machines. We ended up with creating a new master VM from
the VMware Template (converted by RAS) and creating additional Groups from this VM. 

image.png

Does the computer have a machine certificate installed?

Hmm... Under Personal Certs I see a guid cert issued by a guid. Under Remote Desktop certs I see a named cert issued by the RDSH itself.  Am I looking in the right place? PA and GW are 2019. RDSH are 2016.

rasservercert.png

rasrdscert.png

Here is what I have for my RAS Server and one of my RAS RDS servers.

We do have a non-domain-controller CA in the environment, but I'm not seeing a machine cert other than the guid one:

Thanks for the replies. Still working with support on this one. If it is the machine cert that's the issue, is there a way to trigger a request for a machine cert?

i do mine via group policy. if you have a special cert, say a ten year web server cert, i don’t know how to automate that

Thanks again. Support ended up just helping us rebuild.

Hey, Dale - I just installed the Performance Monitor bits myself. It's pretty lackluster. I'm able to hit + Create &gt; New Dashboard &gt; Add query... but I don't know where to go from there. I'm not familiar enough with Grafana or InfluxDB. Let me know if you discover anything useful,

Thanks JD will do, as it gives you the nice big show on TV thing I thought it would be another button that I was not seeing but might need to dig into the weeds a bit here. I'll keep playing and let you know if I find anything but I'm in the same boat, not a clue about Grafana.

hmm think I'm falling at the first hurdle, Ive got a trial version of parallels as we are looking to include it as an offering for our PS. I dont even have a plus icon to create a new dashboard. Do I have to actually sign up to grafana?

Oh ah might help if I read the docs, looks like admin/admin is the key

Working with Parallels Support on this but throwing it to the channel as well. We have a lot of reports from users with high resolution monitors - lots of Surface Pros - where launched apps are tiny. DPI Aware is off. Tried Smart-sizing on and off. Disabled advanced scaling in Windows. Setting their scaling to 250%+ kind of helps but then all other apps look terrible. Thoughts or ideas?

Hi guys, I would like to know your experience in the field of the RAS solution compared to the Citrix solution. I hear that Citrix is for Enterprise like banking and healthcare while RAS is not good for such large and demanding environments. But is this really the case today?

It clearly depends on your use-case. Policy control is more granular with Citrix.
With 19.3 they introduced template versioning and scheduled creation of hosts.
You will get a lot features for less money compared to other vendors (reducing the complexity)

Hi Francesco, as Julian says, it’s all about the usecase. It’s not so much a size thing - most vendors end up in some kind pod architecture at scale anyway. 

As a company, Citrix has made it clear they want to focus on enterprise. Parallels already has a focus on mid market customers but this does not mean Citrix would not fit smaller customers and Parallels would not fit larger ones.

Would be happy to show you more, just DM as needed :+1: 

Disclaimer: I work for Parallels :grin: 

Some recent info from Parallels & XenTegra:

Our new Parallels RAS success story featuring XenTegra ONE  is now live! <https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/customer-stories/xentegra-one|https://www.parallels.com/products/ras/customer-stories/xentegra-one>
 
Key Points:
Challenges with previous solution: costly management, complexity, and security risks.
Improved remote desktop administration.
VPN replacement.
Impressive results: 25-30% growth in six months, $100k annual savings, 10x easier administration, and reduced hardware.
Positive feedback from engineers on simplicity and support.

Looking for a Parallels consultant to help in our Azure environment. Any recommendations?

Trying to build RDSH Templates in Azure. We're on 19.2 and finding the autoscale to be a challenge. Amongst other things.

Exactly what I tell all customers I talk to. Over the last few years, I can’t show it anymore as I don’t have licenses anymore but I do tell them and show screen caps of what they would get it they move over to Parallels! The backend they need to maintain is way easier, upgrades are faster than getting a Cappuccino, what can I say more?!

Whats the scoop with Parallels RAS and vGPU support? I saw RAS 19 documentation that mentioned RemoteFX (which I thought was killed off) and then that vGPU is only supported on Azure. What's the actual stance as far as supported environments and methodology?

RAS supports vGPU on prem, Azure, AVD,  wherever you like.

This example runs in Azure, but that doesn't mean it can only run there - was just easier to get hold of a GPU in Azure than buy one for the demo (this was a full NVIDIA A10) :slightly_smiling_face:  <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6LIJG1KlcU>

You can also see in this healthcare-specific video vGPU access to an NIVDIA M60, which is way older and slower than the A10 :slightly_smiling_face:  (fast forward to about 2:10 to see that). <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsuH2rqjDt8&list=PLFEwXRyfSuQunOCAB8vC43g0ytkCJU9j0&index=20>

RemoteFX vGPU was deprecated in win10 1809 but RemoteFX display acceleration (e.g. AVC444) is still in place, so is probably why you are seeing that.

Thanks for posting this <@ULM1JLE2H> . I have searched the doc set on this and come up empty for this setup. I found some details in the optimization guide. Anything more on setup for this? Most of it is straight forward with a little bit of testing. However I’m curious myself how the AVC444 performs on a host pool. Something I want to sync up and test soon. 

Hey Ray, most of the documentation on RemoteFX Display is from Microsoft. Is that where you have been looking? Alternatively I can see if I can line you up with some of the folks at this end and talk through what you want to test out. Most normal humans don’t need AVC444 as I’m sure you already know some of the impacts on the network of doing things that way, but I’m sure we can walk through it. I’ll email you and keep the ball rolling that way.

Hope the event went well. Saw the awesome Halloween slides :partying_face: :jack_o_lantern: :ghost: 

It might actually be worth a conversation with Benny Tritsch on this. He’s done a lot of testing and can probably take you through some of the things he’s been doing with Microsoft and with Parallels.

With the recent Citrix CSP Price changes we took a look at <#CL6GJANMR|>, but only to notice, that all our customers depend on Dell Wyse ThinOS clients, which don't seem to be supported.
Anything I need to know regarding this support? Otherwise this is sadly not an option.

I'm not familiar with Wyse but does this suggest it's supported? <https://docs.parallels.com/parallels-ras-management-portal-20/infrastructure/gateways/configure-a-gateway/wyse>

Sorry for the late reply.
I found the same, but I think it's missleading. This is especially about the Gateway, not RAS access itself.
There is another paragraph in the docs, about everything being unsupported since ThinOS 9.x
<https://kb.parallels.com/de/129045/>

<@ULHA2J7RT> i wonder if its a v20 thing specifically. I noticed there isn't anything updated for 19.3 and 19.4 and we are having some other compatibility scenarios which we are told are v20 fixed.  But this is good question on this. I am going to follow up with our RAS team as we have to support all sorts of flavors and ThinOS 9.x is of course the most prevalent one now over 8.x of those

We have direct dialogue with dev/PM team for other things so just hit them up as we will need to know answer here as well and IF v20 is where that compatibility starts or not

ThinOS 8 is long dead, afaik, so ThinOS 9 support would be super important.

yep.  For v20 documentation at least, it shows 2303 or later which if my cross checker is accurate with these newer build numbers like everybody else has, that is 9.4.1141 and above. So nothing there about anything below that.  Are you guys 9.3.x builds or anything lower?  Seems like a missing window of builds here unless the other Wyse builds below that fall out of support? I haven't checked their /Dell's support on the older 9.1/9.2/9.3s

We have 3040 und OptiPlex 3000. IF we would migrate to Parallels RAS, we would be on the latest Firmware.

But which of the access agents would you chose? The RDP one?

I have yet to go down the Wyse ThinOS route for their management and what is there in these, but RAS is all RDP for a broker

So maybe you just configure the Wyse ThinOS RDP Client to point to the RAS Broker.

I've opened a Pre-Sales ticket to them to clarify my questions.

<@ULEEXJUD8>
&gt; We have direct dialogue with dev/PM team for other things so just hit them up as we will need to know answer here as well and IF v20 is where that compatibility starts or not
Any news about that?

<@ULHA2J7RT> forgot about this. Yep, talked to their number one guy on the tech side. So the thing is because RAS doesn't have native client/brokering through Wyse, they have to use what JD posted above where they just 'enumerate' (wyse broker) so its limited as what it is doing with them needing be a 3rd party broker for Wyse at that point. That was completely broken in 9.0.  He said even though 9.1-9.3 not exactly mentioned now anywhere in documentation, those should work again with that.  Now, he also said he has customer that install their true RAS Linux client on Thin OS (sideload or something) and then it just like any client having all normal capabilities (not just using the Wyse Broker piece) So in short, 9.0 still broke as Dell disallowed that 3rd party brokering, but past that, he told us it works.

I have a call with them tomorrow, where I said I might be interested, but only if ThinOS 9.x works flawless.
Let's see how that turns out.

the sideload piece. Yeah, not something I would be doing with customers. The Wyse Broker capability is the only other way. So not a polished solution by any means.  You are basically offloading from Wyse to their SCG or Connection Broker (forget which role) as a Wyse Broker to simply enumerate for the Wyse client.    Yeah, def let us know how that goes and what you make out of it based on this

So I received an answer:
Dell Wyse ThinOS is not supported.
Only with a fallback to the native RDS Broker, instead of the parallels broker. Which isn't recommended.
Which is sad. We made a PoC and the product is really nice, some parts are even better than Citrix, but 80% of our users use ThinOS 9 so that's a killer.

<@ULHA2J7RT> thanks for update on that side what you got there. But you are getting message that simply unsupported no matter what 9.x build?

With ThinOS 9 you can configure "Other Brokers" and point to the RDS Broker, that still lingers under the Parallels Stack, But leaves 99% of the RAS features laying unused.
As ThinOS 9 is modular, you install only the connection clients you need, like RDS or ICA/HDX, and the RAS Client is not available for ThinOS 9, there the native RAS agent cant't connect to the native RAS Broker, which makes this very unusable.

Thanks guys, bummer for sure.
The information we received was you can use "Other Brokers" but now that you break it down more around the feature set and issues.

<@ULM1JLE2H> Road Map?

I can’t give you too much  in a public forum <@ULLH5JGFR>. But I can say we have been actively talking to Dell on this topic for a while. Feel free to apply pressure to both orgs - it can’t hurt.

I was talking to Pre Sales in Germany and that we can’t give them over 1000 SPLA licenses without Dell Support. 
<@ULM1JLE2H> Are you from Parallels? My guys said that there already have been cancelled projects like ours and that they are searching as much examples to convince management to invest in a ThinOs client. 

Also in my understanding, Parallels already has a good native Linux Client. And a client on Igel. I think ThinOS is more or less Linux based. So the fact that there already is a RAS Linux Client should’ve been the biggest hurdle already? Now it only needs to be ported ?!

Hi Marco. I’ll talk to the German Presales team and make sure we have all the facts

<@ULM1JLE2H> I see you replied to me in the forums ;-)

To clarify, as some reading this have mis-understood the above, Dell ThinOS is supported by Parallels RAS as documented here. <https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-uk/wyse-3040-thin-client/dell_thinos_rn_2308_06_03/parallels-ras-remote-application-server?guid=guid-509205a8-263f-4295-9754-05bfeafe1531&amp;lang=en-us|https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-uk/wyse-3040-thin-client/dell_thinos_rn_230[…]rver?guid=guid-509205a8-263f-4295-9754-05bfeafe1531&amp;lang=en-us>