NLB & separate RDP connections for network adapters

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

Date: Sat, 08 May 2004 11:32:50 -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

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Windows 2003 Network Load Balancing Problem
    ... Sadly my servers websites were configured with specific IPs and host ... I find it very strange why the NLB driver can receive on a virtual IP ... he set his IIS website to use ALL UNASSIGNED addresses rather than ... specifically pointing it at the single virtual cluster address. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.clustering)
  • Re: Load Balanced TS Servers and Unicast Flooding
    ... Remove each on of your tse servers from the cluster, ... Start adding them back to the NLB Cluster. ... > NICs. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.terminal_services)
  • Re: Load balancing strange issue
    ... I often made a NLB cluster but never had this much problems configuring it. ... I updated the NIC drivers to the newest version today on both servers. ... >> Cluster configuration stabilized. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.clustering)
  • Re: NLB Terminal Servers
    ... "If the clients can not reach the "Management" NIC's what purpose do they ... Do the "Management" NIC's act as the heartbeat for the NLB cluster??" ... Should I use Unicast or Multicast?? ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.clustering)
  • NLB & separate RDP connection for network adapters
    ... We have two terminal servers configured as members of a NLB cluster. ... one for management and one bound to NLB. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.clustering)