Distribution of Multiple Term. Servers

[Guest]

Hello,

Currently we have 1 Terminal Server which is getting maxed out. I would
like to add maybe 2 more Terminal Server. Is there a product out there that
will direct connecting users to the different servers based on each servers
usage thus allowing a equal distribution of users on all the servers?

Thanks.

Gary

 

[Vera Noest [MVP]]

Windows Network Load Balancing is included in the OS. It's not
very advanced, though, and doesn't take the actual load of the
servers into consideration. It's more like a round-robin load
balancing.

For load balancing that takes actual load into consideration,
you'll need a 3th party product.

243523 - Using Terminal Server with Windows Load Balancing Service
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=243523

 

[Guest]

One of the 3rd party products Vera is referring to is WTSGateway Pro, which
runs a few hundred bucks. Info here:

http://www.workthin.com/tshw.htm

P.S. Greetings Vera.

Patrick Rouse
Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
http://www.workthin.com

 

[Brad Pears]

I am running a windows 2000 term server and a windows 2003 terminal server
using the product Patrick referred to WTSGateway Pro. This product costs
$299 US for two servers. An extra $99 per server.

You DO need to run this product on it's own machine though - as all RDP
traffic will connect to that machine first before being redirected to the
correct server.You do not need much of a machine to do this - you will
likely have one sitting around doing nothing that you can use...I used one
of our older machines. It's a P3-600, 256mb RAM. I purchased XP Pro to
install on it and the WTS Gateway Pro software works perfectly and was dead
simple to setup.

This software is downloadable for a 30 day trial and the full thing works.
Basically, once installed, you would have to configure all of your RDP
clients to connect to this new machine (I called ours TSLoadBal). Then the
WTSGateway software receives the connection request and logs the user onto
whichever server is best suited to handle the request at that time. (this is
configurable). If you have users that you need to connect directly to a
particualr server for whatever reason, you simply configure their RDP client
to connect to that specific machine instead (as you do now). We have remote
users that I want to use our Win2K3 server ALWAYS just because they like the
drive redirection that Win2K term server could not provide.

One other thing you have to think of first before you implement load
balancing is that if you are going to have users connecting to multiple
servers, you want their desktops and apps to run the same on each server.
THis means you have to install the required software on each server in the
same locations AND you should implement TS roaming profiles. We did this and
it was a bit of a chore but works well. Basically the user sees the same
desktop no matter which machine they connect to. There are some bugs with
this but it's not bad enough to not use it... (and we are using two
different OS's too!!!)

The best guy to talk to about the product is Claudio Rodrigues - here's his
email address... (e-mail address removed)

Here's his website where you can find/download the product... There are also
other interesting TS products there as well...
www.terminal-services.net


Brad

 

[Guest]

Thanks for all the information. I'll give it a try.

Gary