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Windows 2008 Terminal Server Farm - 7.Oct.2008 1:17:38 PM

ColinC426

Posts: 3
Joined: 7.Oct.2008
Status: offline

Hi

I would really appreciate some help with this. I've setup a small Terminal Server farm using two Windows 2008 servers. If I connect on my local network using six different accounts, the sessions are split evenly across the two servers. Excellent!

I'd now like to publish this farm using ISA 2006 and have attempted to do so by forwarding rdc requests to the TS Session Broker server within the farm. However, if I then try connecting using the six different accounts, they all log onto the same server.

Is there a good guide out there on how to publish a Windows 2008 Terminal Server Farm using ISA Server 2006? or can anyone offer any tips?

Thankyou for any help you can give me.

Colin.

Post #: 1

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RE: Windows 2008 Terminal Server Farm - 8.Oct.2008 9:55:32 PM

joseph.a.paradi

Posts: 29
Joined: 20.Jun.2004
Status: offline

Colin - are you using an ISA Web Farm definition to load balance the traffic across the servers or are you relying on round robin DNS? If you are relying on round robin DNS then it may be that the DNS entry is being cached on the ISA server and so it is directing the traffic to only one of the servers. The article on Technet (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772418.aspx) seems to suggest that external load balancing and round robin DNS are both viable options for TS farms.

I don't have any personal experience with a TS farm with Server 2008 so not sure if this is very helpful, but I hope it is.
Joseph

(in reply to ColinC426)

Post #: 2

RE: Windows 2008 Terminal Server Farm - 21.Oct.2008 1:17:02 PM

ColinC426

Posts: 3
Joined: 7.Oct.2008
Status: offline

Thankyou for the reply Joseph.

I think I've got the round robin bit to work, in that I have a dns entry called 'term-farm' and it has two IP addresses corresponding to the two terminal servers. This works fine intenally, if I use nslookup I will get either of the two IP addresses first.

How I've tried to publish this on ISA server is using the 'Publish Non-Web Server Protocol' wizard, as I didn't think I could use the Web farm method you mention as I need to publish a terminal server protocol (Unless you now better, I'm certainly no expert). But the publish Non-web server wizard only allows you to specify one destination server IP address (not a dns name), which I've put as the first terminal server, but all requests now go to that server and are not load balanced.

Does this seem to you like an unusal thing to want to do? I thought publishing load balanced MS Terminal Servers behind an MS ISA firewall would be quite a popular and obvious thing to want to do....

Thanks again for you help.

(in reply to joseph.a.paradi)

Post #: 3

RE: Windows 2008 Terminal Server Farm - 27.Oct.2008 10:08:33 PM

joseph.a.paradi

Posts: 29
Joined: 20.Jun.2004
Status: offline

One thing you may want to look at is a combination of TS Gateway and a farm of TS servers. The TS Gateway will allow you to securely publish the TS functionality over SSL through ISA which allows much more chance of getting through firewalls. You then could specify the TS farm as an endpoint for the TS Gateway and hopefully that will result in the balancing of connections that you seek.

I personally have been using the TS Gateway functionality through ISA since Server 2008 Beta and it is a tremendous functionality for remote administration. I hope it could also provide an elegant solution to your issue.

Joseph

(in reply to ColinC426)

Post #: 4

RE: Windows 2008 Terminal Server Farm - 28.Oct.2008 5:07:02 AM

ColinC426

Posts: 3
Joined: 7.Oct.2008
Status: offline

Thankyou Joseph. TS Gateway does seem to be an excellent solution and really easy to publish in ISA. Only done a small amount of testing, but the incoming connections do seem to be evenly split accross the TS farm. Being able to remotely manage any machine on our network using the TS Gateway is a huge bonus also.

Thankyou so much for giving me a great solution.

(in reply to ColinC426)

Post #: 5