Remote Desktop Session Broker Load Balancing
Author:
sengstar2005
Updated date:
Jan 27, 2021
Accomplished systems and network administrator with 10+ years of experience managing server infrastructures and data-center operations.
This article will talk about load balancing terminal servers with relation to Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. Normally, load balancing is a technique for distributing load over a number of servers. In the Microsoft Remote Desktop or Terminal Services world, load balancing is really about managing the number of sessions being distributed over a number of terminal servers. For example, if one server has two remote desktop sessions and each session is running high-CPU intensive applications, and a second server has 20 remote desktop sessions with each session running "notepad", the next connection to the Remote Desktop [terminal services] load balancing farm will be re-directed to the first server because it has less connections [regardless of actual load on the server]. This load balancing mechanism is called Remote Desktop Connection Broker.
Add the RD Connection Broker server to the deployment and configure high availability
- Article
- 07/29/2021
- 6 minutes to read
- 8 contributors
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In this article
Applies to: Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016
You can deploy a Remote Desktop Connection Broker [RD Connection Broker] cluster to improve the availability and scale of your Remote Desktop Services infrastructure.
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Hi Everyone,
I need help with this. I have configured RDS Standard deployment with 4 servers, RDCB, RDWA, and 2 RDSH servers.
I would like to configure Load Balancing but I am not able to find article which explains this. People speaking about round robin load balancing and someone said that that is not Load Balancing inthe traditional sense, not by % load.
Example [Round Robin] user 1 goes on TS1, user2 goes on TS2 and user3 goes on TS1. If user 1 loads up the sever to 50% ram use, user 3 still gets placed on TS1 even though TS2 has more resources available.
Can you also tell me how to create pre-configured rdp file which will be deployed on users desktops.
Can someone please help with this?
Thank you in advanced.
- Edited by kaktak Friday, February 10, 2017 10:27 AM
Friday, February 10, 2017 10:26 AM
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Hi kaktak,
you make your RDS infrastructure highly available by configuring your RD role service as following :
-RD Session Host & RD Virtualization Host : you just need to deploy and add additional RDSH to the Session Collection or an additional RDVH to Virtual Desktop Collection [you have 2 RDSH so i'ts ok for the RemoteApp server].
-RD Web Access et Gatey : you have to deploy and configure a Network load balancing solution [software or hardware]. You can use a native Windows feature [Microsoft NLB] if you have a small environment or [i recommend] using a hardware [physical] load balancer such as F5 BIG-IP or A10 if you have a critical Apps environments.
-RD Connection Broker : you have to deploy a SQL Server to host the RDS HA SQL database. Brokers Servers need this central SQL database to store all informations related to your RDS deployment. You can use SQL Server Express Edition [2012 R2 SP1] if you have a small environment and use a SQLcmd.exe script to daily backup this DB or deploy a CLuster SQL environment [2012 R2 standard or enterprise].
-RD Licensing Server : you have select "Per-User" as licensing mode, do not worry if your standalone RDLS server is down, all users will continue to connect to their RDS ressources [RemoteApp, vDesktop ..Etc]. But if you use a "Per-Device" licensing mode, you need to make highly available your RDLS server by deploying an additional server and install on it additional RDS CAL.
if you are interested, my RDS 2012 R2 Pocket Consultant book is available on Amazon.com and contains all informations you need to design, deploy and manage a RDS 2012 R2 highly available deployment.
Note : all steps are also applied to RDS 2016 and 2012. MS introduced same new improvements on RDS 2016 but the role stays the same, with all dialog box and options.
Goodluck
HK.
Hicham KADIRI | Just Another IT Guy
Livre de référence RDS 2012 R2 désormais disponible !
RDS 2012 R2 reference book is now available !
Découvrez tous mes eBooks ]- Marked as answer by kaktak Tuesday, March 28, 2017 8:21 AM
Monday, February 13, 2017 1:49 PM
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Hi Kasper,
Why I need to configure Broker High Availability? I don't need Broker load balancing I need to configrue RD Session Host Load Balancing.
- Marked as answer by Jay Gu Sunday, February 12, 2017 2:15 PM
- Unmarked as answer by Jay Gu Sunday, February 12, 2017 2:15 PM
Saturday, February 11, 2017 9:40 AM
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...andfor you tobe able to create a Collection, you need RD Connection Broker. As mentioned it doesn't really make sense to enable load-balancing on your RD session Hosts and not enable it on the RD Connection Broker, not from a high availability perspective any way.
Sunday, February 12, 2017 2:50 PM
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Hi kaktak,
you make your RDS infrastructure highly available by configuring your RD role service as following :
-RD Session Host & RD Virtualization Host : you just need to deploy and add additional RDSH to the Session Collection or an additional RDVH to Virtual Desktop Collection [you have 2 RDSH so i'ts ok for the RemoteApp server].
-RD Web Access et Gatey : you have to deploy and configure a Network load balancing solution [software or hardware]. You can use a native Windows feature [Microsoft NLB] if you have a small environment or [i recommend] using a hardware [physical] load balancer such as F5 BIG-IP or A10 if you have a critical Apps environments.
-RD Connection Broker : you have to deploy a SQL Server to host the RDS HA SQL database. Brokers Servers need this central SQL database to store all informations related to your RDS deployment. You can use SQL Server Express Edition [2012 R2 SP1] if you have a small environment and use a SQLcmd.exe script to daily backup this DB or deploy a CLuster SQL environment [2012 R2 standard or enterprise].
-RD Licensing Server : you have select "Per-User" as licensing mode, do not worry if your standalone RDLS server is down, all users will continue to connect to their RDS ressources [RemoteApp, vDesktop ..Etc]. But if you use a "Per-Device" licensing mode, you need to make highly available your RDLS server by deploying an additional server and install on it additional RDS CAL.
if you are interested, my RDS 2012 R2 Pocket Consultant book is available on Amazon.com and contains all informations you need to design, deploy and manage a RDS 2012 R2 highly available deployment.
Note : all steps are also applied to RDS 2016 and 2012. MS introduced same new improvements on RDS 2016 but the role stays the same, with all dialog box and options.
Goodluck
HK.
Hicham KADIRI | Just Another IT Guy
Livre de référence RDS 2012 R2 désormais disponible !
RDS 2012 R2 reference book is now available !
Découvrez tous mes eBooks ]- Marked as answer by kaktak Tuesday, March 28, 2017 8:21 AM
Monday, February 13, 2017 1:49 PM
High Availability and Load Balancing Remote Desktop Services:
The Remote Desktop Services also called the Terminal Server predecessor is a value-added service of Windows Servers which is a cost-effective solution for the hardware and software licenses and ease of access to the apps. The RDS servers are very critical services as other Windows Services and high availability and Load Balancing is the most needed configuration in the Microsoft Windows Network. The High Availability and Load Balancing are not changed much from Windows Server 2012 R2 to the most recent release of Windows Server 2022.
In this article, we are going to look at important configurations required to set up High Availability and Load Balancing. The High availability part is relevant to RDS Connection Brokers and Load balancing will be of RDS Session Hosts. In order to configure RDS Connection Broker with High Availability, we need to have Microsoft SQL servers in place. Even though we have High availability for Connection Broker it is not complete if you have not configured failover for the Microsoft SQL server which holds the database of Connection Broker services. I have demonstrated RDS high availability with a single SQL server, but in your setup make sure you have configured high availability for the MSSQL server as well.