This step-by-step guide provides instructions for configuring Network Load Balancing (NLB) with Terminal Services.

Using NLB with Terminal Services offers the benefits of increased availability, scalability, and load-balancing performance, as well as the ability to distribute a large number of Terminal Services clients over a group of terminal servers.

NLB with Terminal Services overview

NLB distributes traffic across several servers by using the TCP/IP networking protocol. You can use NLB with a terminal server farm to scale the performance of a single terminal server by distributing sessions across multiple servers.

Terminal Services Session Broker (TS Session Broker), included in Windows Server® 2008 Standard, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise, and Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, keeps track of disconnected sessions on the terminal server farm, and ensures that users are reconnected to those sessions. Additionally, TS Session Broker enables you to load balance sessions between terminal servers in a farm. This functionality is provided by the TS Session Broker Load Balancing feature. However, this session-based load balancing feature requires a front-end load balancing mechanism to distribute the initial connection requests to the terminal server farm. You can use a load balancing mechanism such as DNS round robin, NLB or a hardware load balancer to distribute the initial connection requests. By deploying NLB together with TS Session Broker Load Balancing, you can take advantage of both the network-based load balancing and failed server detection of NLB, and the session-based load balancing and per server limit on the number of pending logon requests that is available with TS Session Broker Load Balancing.

When deploying a terminal server farm by using NLB, each server needs to serve all users. To facilitate this, you must store per-user information, system information, and common data in an accessible place, such as a back-end file server.

Terminal Services components

Terminal Services has two components that are important for establishing load balancing: the Terminal Services Session Broker service and the Terminal Services Configuration snap-in.

Terminal Services Session Broker service

This service maintains a database that keeps track of terminal server sessions in a load-balanced terminal server farm and provides information to the terminal server, which is used to connect users to existing sessions.

When the Terminal Services Session Broker service starts, it creates the Session Directory Computers local group. By default, this group is not populated. You must choose the individual terminal servers or groups that you want to participate in the Terminal Services Session Broker service, and then manually change group memberships to the Session Directory Computers group.

The Terminal Services Session Broker service starts automatically after you install the TS Session Broker role service on the server that you want to use to track user session information for a load-balanced terminal server farm. You can use a single TS Session Broker server to track user sessions across multiple farms because there is minimal performance overhead.

When you install the TS Session Broker role service, the following changes occur on the local computer:

Installation prerequisites

Installation procedure

If you do not have any of the Terminal Services role services installed, use the following procedure to install the TS Session Broker role service.

Terminal Services Configuration snap-in

This snap-in is included on each terminal server. Terminal servers that comprise the terminal server farm communicate with TS Session Broker to ensure that users are transparently reconnected to the original server hosting their disconnected sessions. The process is:

Requirements for using NLB with a terminal server

To use NLB, a computer must have:

Steps for configuring NLB with Terminal Services

To configure NLB with Terminal Services, complete the following steps:

Step 1: Set up a terminal server farm with TS Session Broker.

Step 2: Install NLB.

Step 3: Create an NLB cluster.

Step 1: Set up a terminal server farm with TS Session Broker

For a terminal server to use TS Session Broker, you must add the computer account for the terminal server to the Session Directory Computers local group on the TS Session Broker server.

You can configure a terminal server to join a farm in TS Session Broker by using the Terminal Services Configuration snap-in.

• The IP address used for reconnection must not be the same as the cluster IP address. If you select the cluster IP address, you are not assured that you will be reconnected to the same session. • Only the first selected IPv4 address will be used by clients running Remote Desktop Connection 5.2 and earlier. • Using IPv6 addresses is not recommended if the terminal server farm contains servers that are running Windows Server 2003.

Step 2: Install NLB

NLB must be installed on the network adapter that you want to use for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection.

Step 3: Create an NLB cluster

To configure the NLB cluster, you must configure three types of the parameters:

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