View connection server - the best loadbalancing solution ?

[maros141]

Hello all,

I am wondering about the best load balanicng and HA solution for 1500 virtual desktops. I have experience with Microsoft NLB cluster and DNS round robin. But I am not sure if is this solution is sufficient for 1500 virtual desktop(VD). Have you got experience with loadbalaning technology for 1500 VD ? I want to provide the best HA solution for these VD.

(I want to use two or three View connection servers. But now, I don't know whether they will be on same subnet or on different subnets)

Could you give me an idea please? What solutions do you use or prefere?

Thanks a lot

[mittim12]

We currently use round robin for our load balancing but that comes with some serious limitations. Here is an older load balancing guide from VMware, http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vdm20-load-balancing-guide.pdf. It goes over a couple of scenerios including NLB. As I said it's an older document but I haven't seen anything newer released from VMware.

Also a blog post about using NetScaler to load balance. http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2009/06/configuring-citrix-netscaler-to-load.html

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[soehl]

I think NLB and Round Robin with are very short TTL are proper solutions for a scenario like this.

I would prefer NLB, Round Robin is more a HA-solution then a real loadbalacing.

Unfourtanley NLB doesn´t work fine in some network infrastructures and is sometimes to complex for the network guys.

What connection type (direct or tunneled) to the Desktops do you use?

[mikebarnett]

I would seriously suggest investing in a hardware load-balancing solution. This is not something that is necessarily required but in working with many different View customers with different deployment sizes I can honestly say that I see very few issues with hardware solutions vs NLB or DNS round-robin. The best solutions are the ones that use the jSession ID to track the session (don't quote me, I just recall this being the optimal solution for View specifically).

I won't advertise for anyone in particular but I have seen many customers having great success with the BIG-IP line from F5 (www.f5.com).

Good luck!

-Mike