I’m working on some labs and projects with KEMP Loadmaster load balancing appliances (LM 2400, LM-R320) That will lead to some blog post on load balancing several workloads, which are all on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V or integrate in to Azure. The load balancers used in the labs are the virtual appliances, depending on the needs and environment these are a very good, cost effective option for production as well and depending on the version you get they scale very well. Hence their use in cloud environments, they will not hold you back at all!
To stimulate your interest in load balancing and high availability I’ve put up a video on load balancing RD Gateway services. Consider it a teaser or introduction to more about the subject.
Why use an appliance (hardware/virtual)? Well let’s look at the 2 alternatives:
- Round robin DNS, which is also sometimes used is just to low tech for most real life scenarios and sometimes can’t be used or is less efficient which impacts scalability and performance. On top of that it doesn’t provide health checking for failover purposes.
- I’ve also said before that while Windows NLB provides layer 4 load balancing out of the box it’s pretty basic. It also often causes a lot of network grief and the implementation can be tedious. This has not improved in an ever more virtualized & cloud based world. On top of that, when network virtualization comes into play you might paint yourself into a corner as those two don’t mix. But if that’s not a concern and you’re on a budget, I’ve used it with success in the past as well.
We are testing a setup with 2 RD gateway servers in a RD gateway farm installed on Server 2012R2 and using the free KEMP loadmaster VM.
Your blogged helped a lot but we are facing a strange issue.
If we force a failover (shutdown the RD gateway server that handles this connection) for a RDP session from a client to a RDSH server based on Server2012R2 everything works fine and we have a short disruption just like in your vid. The second rdgateway now handles the session.
When we do the same thing to a RDSH server based on Server 2012R1 the RDP session hangs and does nothing even when we wait minutes the RDP sessions is still hanging. We don’t get the reconnection screen. When we turn on the original RD Gateway server where the first connection was made the client drops the connection, we see the reconnect bar and this will eventually fail.
So Server 2012R2 RDSH works great, Server2012R1 RDSH doesn’t.
Our setup is just as vanilla as your setup in the vid. We use a single KEMP load balancer without HA for our proof of concept setup.
I followed the KEMP guidelines for RDS server.
We tested it from different client platform with RDP8.0. verified HTTP connection instead of RPC-HTTPS, disabled the UDP connection for troubleshooting, Fully patched client and server with the most recent windows updates.
Have you experienced this before?