by Greg Shields

The Terminal Services Manager console is one that you’ll find yourself using regularly once your Terminal Servers are fully into production. This console provides a unified location for viewing the users, sessions, and processes that are currently running on one or more Terminal Servers in your environment. A number of actions can be accomplished on any of these exposed objects. For example, through the Terminal Services Manager console, users or sessions can be disconnected, reset, or logged off. This kicks the user off his or her existing session, and in the case of a reset, frees system resources for other uses. This use of the console is particularly handy when user sessions need removing for maintenance purposes, or when users accidentally disconnect their session and need a full reset to restart the login process.

Individual processes can also be killed in this console. If you find that a particular process is hanging the system due to some action on the part of a user, right-clicking that process exposes the End Process action.

Note : Although processes in this view can be sorted by their owning user, there is no way through this interface to identify the processor use by each process.

Although this tool provides a graphical interface for finding and killing processes, discovering which remote process is consuming the most processor resources is actually better accomplished through the use of the pslist command. This command is a part of the Sysinternals PsTools, which can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Web site at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896649.aspx . Download and uncompress this toolkit, then copy it into your computer’s path. Once there, run the command pslist -s {computerName}. The resulting screen will show a list of processes ordered by processor use.

Although the Terminal Services Manager is exposed within Server Manager, with the RTM version of Windows Server 2008, it is actually more useful to use the version that is located in Administrative Tools | Terminal Services. Unlike the version that is exposed in Server Manager, this version can connect to multiple remote Terminal Servers, all at the same time.

You’ll also see that it is possible to connect to and remote control individual users and their sessions from within this tool. This process is actually a function of the same shadowing process described in an earlier part. Because the shadow functionality is only available when launched from within a Terminal Services session, this is the only location from which you can access these two commands. It is not possible to Remote Control or Connect when running the Terminal Services Manager from the server’s console.

About the Author

Greg Shields is an independent author, speaker, and IT consultant, as well as a Partner and Principal Technologist with Concentrated Technology. With 15 years in information technology, Greg has developed extensive experience in systems administration, engineering, and architecture specializing in Microsoft OS, remote application, systems management, and virtualization technologies. He is a Contributing Editor and columnist for TechNet Magazine and Redmond Magazine, and serves as the Series Editor for Realtime Publishers, the world’s leading provider of high-quality content for the IT market. Greg is a highly sought-after and top-ranked speaker for both live and recorded events, and is seen regularly at conferences like TechMentor Events, Microsoft Tech Ed, VMworld, and more. He is a multiple recipient of Microsoft “Most Valuable Professional” award.