How ShutdownPlus differs from any external scripting program written to restart a terminal server or a terminal server running Citrix® or Canaveral.
Cause
ShutdownPlus will ensure that users are logged off properly, registries are closed, and servers are shutdown/restarted gracefully.
Resolution
In order to schedule reboots for terminal servers, the AT command can be run with shutdown.exe or tsshutdown.exe to schedule a restart. We have had many customers explain to us that they first had their programmers write custom scripts that logged users off and then restarted the server with tsshutdown.exe, and some just scheduled shutdown.exe with the AT command. All of them reported they had both inconsistent problems with the server either not rebooting, or when it did reboot, it sometimes did not come up all the way and users got locked out. They also had registry bloating problems with this method.
The most popular add-on software to terminal server does this in the "enterprise edition" of their software. They just schedule tsshutdown.exe with their own internal scheduler. However, the use of tsshutdown.exe to restart terminal servers in a production environment is not recommended by Microsoft, and the system engineers of the other company actually use and recommend our solution over the built-in scheduling of tsshutdown.exe that their own product uses. ShutdownPlus CR, TSE, and Rolling Restart all give reliable and proper restarts.
Many customers that have come to us with this scenario: "Why should we purchase or use your product when the functionality is built into the other company's software?" After 6-9 months, they almost always end up either purchasing or reinstalling our ShutdownPlus product. One customer in particular had problems restarting their terminal servers using tsshutdown.exe. They purchased and installed ShutdownPlus TSE and got problem-free, consistent restarts. About a year later, a new manager of the group removed ShutdownPlus TSE because the restart functionality was "built-in" to the existing software. After they removed ShutdownPlus, they started having issues again. After two months of trying to fix the issues, they wrote their own scripts and even had their programming group write a custom program to do a restart, but they continued to have problems. They reinstalled ShutdownPlus TSE and have not had any restart issues since.
In our vast terminal server consulting experience, and through customer feedback, we have seen businesses try to implement shutdown.exe to restart their servers. In over 90% of the cases we have seen, the servers became slower over time due to improper cleaning of the registry and closing of user sessions. Also, performance started to suffer and random configuration problems started to occur. Ceasing use of shutdown.exe and the use of our software (ShutdownPlus TSE, CR, or Rolling Restart) cured these problems.
Warning: Do not use the shutdown.exe utility to restart a terminal server (either with or without the AT command)! Microsoft recommends to not use this program to restart a terminal server, either manually, through a batch file, or scheduled through the Task Scheduler's AT command because of numerous problems that can happen using this method. It may seem to be working, but slowly the server and registry becomes fragmented. This is because of the lack of the proper internal calls shutdown.exe uses in restarting the server. According to Microsoft, the shutdown.exe file was never intended to restart a terminal server, only a desktop computer. Instead, use one of our inexpensive software products to keep your terminal server refreshed:
