A free health check for Hyper-V clusters and Remote Desktop, without an agent

Small and mid-size sites run Hyper-V, a failover cluster, Remote Desktop Services and SQL Server on a few hosts, and find out what broke when users call: the witness went offline last week, a CSV is almost full, one broker refuses every sign-in, a VM is still in saved state after a power cut, the backups of a VM have been crash-consistent for days. The monitoring suites that see all of this cost per host and need agents and a server of their own.

The OpenThinRDP Manager is a free Windows program that reads all of it from your PC, with the account you already use for administration, and shows it in one window. It was built for the sites that run OpenThinRDP thin clients, and it works the same without them.

• Hyper-V hosts: memory, CPU, disks, services, restarts pending, the clock, VMs off, saved, paused or without heartbeat, checkpoints left for days, planned VMs left behind by a failed migration, the guardians of the vTPM.
• The failover cluster: nodes, quorum and witness (and why a file share witness is offline: the server, the share or the permissions), the Cluster Shared Volumes and their free space, the Storage Spaces Direct pool, its disks and repairs, the networks for live migration, whether the cluster survives one host failing with the VMs it runs.
• Remote Desktop Services: the connection brokers and their database, the RDP certificates, the session hosts and the virtual desktops, who cannot sign in right now and why, RD Gateway and RD Web, and a self-repair for a broker that starts refusing every sign-in (event 804, 0x80070005).
• Active Directory and DNS: domain controllers, replication, FSMO roles, SYSVOL and NETLOGON, the clock against the PDC emulator, ADWS, the DNS zones, missing reverse zones, stale records.
• SQL Server AlwaysOn: the listener, replicas and synchronisation, suspended databases, logins missing on a replica, failed jobs, backups.
• Backups: the backups of the VMs as Hyper-V sees them (application-consistent or not), and a backup of the VMs to a share made by the hosts themselves, without an agent and without moving a VM.
• Hardware: Dell iDRAC over Redfish (power now and over 24 hours, power supplies, temperatures, fans).
• Your services as their users reach them: a web page, a TCP port, a SQL query; and your own checks.
• Certificates: every certificate of every server, what uses it and when it expires, the enterprise CA and its revocation list, and which RDP servers present a certificate a client could verify.
• Not only Hyper-V (new, looking for sites to try them): Proxmox VE, VMware vSphere, Veeam Backup & Replication and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, each from its own API, read only.

Every problem is one sentence with its numbers, what it means, and a repair when there is one: you see what it will do and confirm. Over time: history and forecast for memory, disks and volumes, notices when a problem comes or goes, maintenance per item, and -HealthReport -Json for Task Scheduler or your monitoring system.

• A Windows PC or server with Windows PowerShell 5.1 (every Windows 10/11 and Windows Server 2016 or later).
• An account that administers the servers, with WinRM (5985) to the hosts, domain controllers, brokers and SQL replicas, and Windows authentication on SQL. Without administrator rights, a JEA endpoint can give it only the commands it needs.
• Nothing on the servers: no agent, no service, no database. What it runs there is plain PowerShell you can read, in commands\ and rds\ of the manager.

1. Download the zip of the latest release and extract it, on a share if more administrators use it.
2. Start OpenThinRDP-Manager.exe and choose The servers alone.
3. Settings > Health Center: the Hyper-V hosts (or one node of the cluster), the brokers, the SQL listener, the backup share. The first reading takes about half a minute; then Home shows everything at a glance.

• Not a replacement for a full monitoring suite with alerting on hundreds of servers: it is built for a site with a few hosts and the people who run them.
• The manager runs on Windows; the hardware is read over Redfish (Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro).
• Free for any use, also commercial, but not open source: its license. Everything it runs on your servers is readable.

The full guide of the manager: manager.

This page is docs/guides/hyper-v-rds-health-check.md as published on GitHub, where the documentation, the releases and the discussions are.