Load Balanced Terminal Server Farm?

mzgavc

I'm looking for a solution to the following problem:

I have 2 identical terminal servers that i would like to balance for our incoming RDP connections. NLB does not support the kind of benchmarks i want *network traffic only*, but I only want the users to see 1 available connection, and then be routed to the server with the least amount of load.

Does anyone have a third party solution I can look at, or a solution they've used to implement this?

Thanks,

ajs1976

Citrix Presentation Server advanced Edition includes load balancing. Publish the desktop to a Citrix Web Interface.

Dannybear

I know citrix does it - dont you need a advanced NIC aswell??

ajs1976

The load balancing in a Citrix server farm is independent of the NICs in the server as long as they are working properly.

You can have load balanced NICs within a server, but that is a different type of load balancing.

larkspur

Dude check out LTM from F5 networks. When it comes to LB these guys have it down.


http://www.f5.com/products/bigip/ltm/

when LB termnial sessions make sure you can set persistent session state or else your users will wonder what is going on.......

mzgavc

I actually went with some software from 2x

http://www.2x.com/loadbalancer/

Works great, cheap, and simple to install and manage.

larkspur

so this actually sits on the servers and sends a "heartbeat" to the other node in the event one of the TS servers is unavailble?

will the sessions be moved to the server that is still active if one is inactive for maintenance or what not?

mzgavc

The client sits on the servers. Theres a 3rd server which acts as the host. When people log in to the host server, the host server checks which one of the servers is least busy based on whatever specs you want:

CPU
Ram
Network

etc etc, and hands the connection off to it. So if one server is down, it'll just throw connections onto the server thats up.

If a session is lost, it will reconnect to the session. If the session is lost because the server is down it will create a new session.

Its a really slick program, you can get a free trial of it, and install it on virtual PC's running 2k3 with TS running on them.