NLB & separate RDP connection for network adapters

From: Jim Olsen (james-b-olsen_at_uiowa.edu)
Date: 05/08/04

  • Next message: Bill Bradley: "Errors with MSDTC" 
    Date: Sat, 08 May 2004 17:28:38 -0500

    We have two terminal servers configured as members of a NLB cluster.
    They each have two NICs, one for management and one bound to NLB. We
    would like to force our TS users to connect to our terminal servers by
    using NLB, but allow our admins to connect directly to the management
    interface. The users should not be allowed to login via the management NIC.

    My attempt at accomplishing this was to use permissions on multiple TS
    connections. I modified the original RDP-Tcp connection so that it is
    "bound" only to the NLB NIC (it defaults to all adapters, 0.0.0.0) and
    created a second RDP-Tcp-Mgmt connection that is bound only to the
    management NIC. The problem is that the RDP-Tcp connection listens only
    on the dedicated IP address (I suppose because it's listed first for the
    interface) and not on the cluster IP address. Consequently, users
    cannot connect to the TS servers via the cluster IP address.

    Also, given that our NLB cluster is in unicast mode, I expected a
    connection to the dedicated IP address to still be load balanced (since
    an arp reply for the dedicated IP address would contain the MAC address
    of the cluster). Based on a few small experiments, it doesn't seem to
    behave that way. If that is true, that behavior would also undermine
    our goal of forcing users to use NLB. (The experiments were done using
    Virtual PC 2004 running two TS servers with network adapters on the
    "real" network. The host OS was the TS client. We don't have layer 3
    switches on the network, and I doubt Virtual PC gets involved at layer
    3, but it's possible.)

    Can Windows Server 2003 support our desired goal, and if so, how do I
    configure it?

    Thanks for your help.
    --Jim

  • Next message: Bill Bradley: "Errors with MSDTC"

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