Cross Server/Farm Publishing

  • Thread starter Thread starter chris.whitfield
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chris.whitfield

I realize this may be an odd question, but please humor me if you would.

I have two 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Servers that are members of a 2x load balanced farm. For various reasons, I need to deploy a second farm, which will be running the full 2x Application Server. So, to recap:

LB Farm - (2) 2x Load Balanced RD Servers
App Farm - (1) 2x Application Server

What I want to know is, can I use an application published from the app farm while logged into one of the LB Farm servers? Basically just trying to make sure I can install the 2x Client on the LB Farm servers without messing up the existing load balancing agent and, of course, use the apps from the other farm.
 
Hi there,

we are not sure we understood you well. Anyway, the 2xApplicationServer contains the 2xLoadBalancer as well.
Since there is no way to setup multible farms within the 2xServer yet, you've to buy and setup two 2xServer.
What you would like to set up is a bit unusual. You can e.g. setup another 2xClient on the two load balanced RDS to connect to the App Farm Server. However then you'll have RDP in RDP which might be lower the performance.

Why you don't set up the 2xApplicationServer&loadBalancer on the "App Farm" machine and take the two RD server in the farm. So the two servers are load balanced and the users get published applications?

Kind regards,
 
You've essentially confirmed what I wanted to know, that it is supported to install the client on the load balanced server to access apps published from another.

As to the reasoning, we are a managed service provider and this is for one of our customers. Originally we recommended they buy the full app server but they elected to buy only the load balancer. Now they have 3 apps that must be set up on another server, but they can't swing the cost of the app server on 3 systems. As an interim, we are trying to convince them to buy a single app server license for hosting these apps, which we will publish to the load balanced terminal servers only for when these users need remote access to them. This keeps them from having to have a second remote portal.

Eventually the plan is to push them to go full app server for all 3 servers of course.
 
Just thought I would take a moment to provide an update in case anyone might be interested in the outcome of this thread. As an FYI, in addition to this thread I also opened up a support case to increase my chances of getting the answer to my question as quickly as possible.

The answer to the question asked in response to my initial post is that this is a matter of timing.

To provide a bit more detail, we are a managed services provider and this is for one of our customers. This customer already had 2 servers being load balanced with v8 of the 2x Load Balancing only, but didn't have the budget to upgrade presently to full 2x Application Server. We are in the process deploying a new terminal server for them, for which we had convinced them to go ahead and by the full 2x Application Server. As with users everywhere however, we have a need to keep their lives simple, so telling them 'go here for these apps and here for these other apps' just isn't feasible. Since users are already used to going to a specific location, we wanted to make the apps being publised on the new server available when users hit the existing load balanced servers.

I did end up getting a response from support, and they indicated that it was not 'supported', and also that peformance might be poor, but they also said that it technically should work. Since this customer plans to go ahead and upgrade the existing servers eventually, we went ahead and proceeded with this approach. Unfortunately for me, I have had some experiences since then that make me a little concerned.

During setup and testing of the new 2x Application Server, I ended up at one point installing the 2x Client on the 2x App Server and this caused some unexpected behavior. Any attempts to login via standard RDP to this server, even with SSO enabled for the domain, would result in still being prompted for a login, and launching apps published from this server would briefly display the full desktop with a logon prompt and then would launch as a seamless window only after logging in. Once I removed the 2x client from the server it started functioning normally again. My concern is that if I install the 2x client on my 2x load balanced servers that it will break something.

Does anyone know if this is an issue that will only affect full 2x Appserver agents and I am therefore good, of is it the same agent?
 
It will work but do not enable SSO during the installation when installing the client on the server.
Regarding performance there will be some degradation as you are tunnelling an RDP session on an other RDP session.

What I recommend is to do the following.

1 Create 2 farms, one LB and one for Pub Apps
2. Configure 2 connections on the client who require to use both

This will make your connections more efficient as you are not tunnelling sessions into each other
 
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