Hello
We have purchased seats and are going around updating our management servers for our colleagues to use Lens. First server so far we have upgraded from 5 to 2023.5.310801.0 so we can start to use all the great new features. However it appears that only one person can have a lens session open at a time.
We use management servers so it admins can go on and have a central location to have tools.
I’ve updated, uninstalled, reinstalled, installed to a new location however whichever method of the install its not allowing more than user to have a lens session open.
The issues we see are that if colleague x has lens open, colleague y attempts to open it and then colleague y just sees the lens banner showing and just disappears. We can see in taskmgr under details that several processes start then just disappear. Only when colleague x has closed it, including the exiting of the systemtray icon, then colleague y can open the app.
This worked when we were using Lens 5.
Thank you
John
Hey John,
I would like to confirm your environment, when you say that you are using management servers are you referring to the IBM management servers? Or when you say RDS/TS are you using terminal services from Windows? In either case we would like to look into the issue more closely and would like the version of the server that you are running.
My hunch is that, if you are running in windows, that you are running into a issue with our implementation which checks for multiple instances and if that is the case then we may need to re-evaluate the use case as we do not currently support multiple instances of the application running at the same time (at least not on a single user OS) due to a number of technical issues involving scaling.
Kindly,
The Lens Core Team
Hello, thanks for coming back to me.
The users access a Terminal Server as a management box as a shared resource - These are windows server 2019 and 2022 environments so there will be a need to have multiple instances running on a single OS host.
We use this method as we dont have a VDI (a single OS host per user) solution but our management server can be shared with several users at a time, with a handful attempting to use Lens, especially if we are in a fault finding situation collecting pod logs etc.
We have bought the licenses as we wanted to continue to use Lens since version 5 and it being a great tool, and we believed it would have been a like for like upgrade, to continue to use it as we were previously.
We have now bought the seats, we are very keen to use the newer features and feel like we are now paying for something we are missing out on.
Thank you
John
Hey John,
While I am setting up a terminal server over here to test with I have another question about the installation of Lens on your TS.
Did you execute change user /install before the install of Lens, and then did you execute change user /execute after the installation of Lens?
Or did you install Lens using the Add/Remove control panel?
Either of those ought to have isolated the installation correctly so that the user profiles would be correctly created in isolation.
Kindly,
The Lens Core Team
Hello
Thanks for you response. I’ve attempted two options on different RDS servers:
- install as a user for two users and receive the same issue
- on another server I’ve changed the user to install and execute before and after the install and still seeing the same.
Previously you suggested that its because of the detection - We completed the installs the same as we did with previous versions we were able to use fine/and still am.
its only for the newer versions that we cannot use the same set up
Hey John,
This is exactly what we needed to verify, thank-you for taking the time to check. We will be checking into this and let you know.
Kindly,
The Lens Core Team
Hello,
Is there an update on this, just really keen to get our users to use it now we have paid for the licence
Regards
John
Hey John,
This is scheduled but we do not yet have an estimated release date for this item.
While this is processing I would like you to (re)confirm that a clean re-installation of the previous version on your terminal server is not limited to a single user.
When it is installed can you also forward the details from the Lens About window.
Kindly,
The Lens Core Team
Hey John,
There is some news on this issue. We have an alpha that we are testing internally with support for --user-data-dir that should unblock Lens on Windows using Terminal Services with multiple users.
When that alpha is public and graduates I will let you know.
Kindly,
The Lens Core Team
Hello team,
Do you have any news about the releas date of this feature? Would appreciate for your answer.
Regards,
Sergei