| Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2: Remote Desktop Connection Broker (Part One) |
| Saturday, 17 October 2009 by Michel Roth | |||
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In part 2, we will dive in to the specifics of how to configure and put Connection Broker to work for you in your business. First, let’s look at a little history of Windows Terminal Services. Since Windows Server 2003, we have had the ability within Terminal Services to be deployed as a farm where multiple servers were pooled together as a single resource. This provided the ability to scale out and increase the number of users that could access applications over Terminal Services by distributing them amongst several servers instead connecting hundreds of users to a single server. If you added in Microsoft Network Load balancing then you could also balance the load across servers in the farm. This deployment presented some problems though, for example when user sessions were disconnected. How did we make sure the user is returned to their previous session when they do not know which server they were connected to in the first place? The solution was Session Directory, and in Windows Server 2003 this was implemented in the Terminal Server Session Directory service. It was called Session Directory because that is basically what it was, a directory (or database) of sessions for each user in the farm. The only job Session Directory had in Windows Server 2003 was to redirect a user to a disconnected session. Load balancing was accomplished with Network Load Balancing or a hardware device like BIG-IP. In Windows Server 2008, Session Directory was extended to include load balancing support that was previously only available with hardware devices from companies like Cisco and f5, or software like Microsoft Windows Network Load Balancing. The feature was renamed to Session Broker and has two main functions:
Session Broker was able to add basic load balancing functionality by leveraging the already existing database of sessions in the farm and using that to make a basic load balancing decision. The topology for Session Directory / Session Broker on Window Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 looks like this.
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