Hi All, first time question. Hope this makes sense.
As a project at work I was asked to set up a terminal server \desktop environment on Windows server 2008 SP2, I cant user RDS in server 2008 R2 because of a known bug with roaming profiles.
I set two servers up, one with the session broker service and terminal services and the other with just terminal services, I defined a farm that contains both servers and the session broker service takes care of logins and disconnected sessions. I did have DNS round robin set up for resiliency, if one server went down it then goes to the next available. However, my manager requested that instead of using that I should bin Round Robin and set up NLB, i did. I installed the NLB feature on both servers, assigned both machines as hosts in the new cluster and confirmed connectivity through the new cluster virtual hostname.
That was when the problem started, I know that NLB and the broker service run at different levels of the OSI model and thus gave me a double login every time i logged on via the virtual cluster hostname.
To get around this, I removed the session broker host service from the NLB cluster, it now has only one host, I do intend to provision another terminal server and make that a host in NLB, however, taking out the Session Broker service means i don't get a double login, the login request goes to the NLB host, and then gets passed to the Session Broker service, this then gets sent to the session broker service and a user gets one login and goes to the desktop.
Is this an acceptable enterprise solution? To my mind, NLB passes the login request to the single host, this then passes that login info direct to session broker server and the user only sees one login and gets to the desktop. Okay, so at the moment I have only one server host defined in NLB, but will address that when i create another Terminal Server and add it as the secondary NLB host.
So in a nutshell, I have NLB, it connects to one Terminal server, for the moment, and a Session broker server that sits away from that but processes login info successfully. Is this a valid setup? Could someone comment? Or have they had to do this and have some pointers for me?
Thanks in advance.