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nepdev
Asked: 2018-10-17 15:20:45 +0800 CST

Host Affinity / Load balancing Microsoft RDS across VPN

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Is there a way to load-balance multiple Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) session host servers across a VPN?

What I mean is the following:

2 departments, geographically separate, connected with VPN. Single Microsoft network domain. RDS session broker installed in Department 1 plus some session host servers.

Further session host servers installed in Department 2, using the same session broker from Department 1. Same users, single domain.

Out of the box, what happens is that when a user logs in at Department 2, the session broker selects a session host server based on load, number of users logged in etc. So that user might get a session host located in Department 1 - and the entire RDP traffic now must travel across the VPN, gets encrypted, decrypted etc.

What I want to have happen is - every user logging in at Department 1 only and always gets one of the session hosts of the server farm in Department 1, and any user in Department 2 only and always gets one of the servers located in Department 2.

Is that possible? I find no documentation on this, and Google brings up nothing.

The two departments will have different subnets so the session broker will be aware from where the user logs in. And it should be told to use a session host server on the same subnet as the user logs in from - but how do I do that?

Edit

I realize that, technically, I should have called this not load-balancing but host affinity. I am looking for a way to do this transparently for non-technical users - they should not have to use RDWeb and select different hosts themselves.

Further, users are mobile (roaming) in this scenario so I cannot divide them into groups for Dept 1 and Dept 2 - same users will end up using client computers in Dept 1 location and Dept 2 locations and they should be getting the local RDS hosts every time.

windows

1 Answers

  1. You say you want load balancing but then you describe your desired scenario, which is decidedly not load balancing. You have load balancing now, what you want is not load balancing. You want Department 1 users to have affinity to their RDS host and you want Department 2 users to have affinity to their RDS host. This is not load balancing.

    You'll need two separate Session Broker farm names, one for the Department 1 RDS host and another for the Department 2 RDS host.

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