Best load balancer option

[fborges555]

HI gurus

at this point I am setting up a Horizon 7 platform, I have all setup already ,sec server along with connection servers and VC servers, all is good in my world at this point, I just need a little guide on best load balancer solution that I can set in place and  what has been your experience and your recommendation?

Thanks a bunch gurus

[chaz112182]

ive had good experiences with the kemp VLM model in a couple of different deployments. priced competitively and seems to get the job done.

[Ray_handels]

VMware works together with F5 so my guess is that will be your best bet if you already have one. When you look at documentation this is what they mostly do the tests with.

Going for Citrix Netscaler might get the job done but is not supported ... You'd wonder why.

[tjbailey]

We've been using NetScaler for years on our View 5 then Horizon 6.2 environment without any issues.  It's not the most fancy in terms of Horizon-specific features, but it does the job.  You could always try the NetScaler VPX Express for free.

[fborges555]

Thanks a bunch gurus for all your prompted reply, but I went ahead and use Balance from inlab, but now I am having the following problem:

When the LB is on Failover(FO) mode I can create a connection to the sec and  from there to the connection broker and I can see the VDI with no problem, but when I set the LB on Round Robin(RR) I get a tunnel could not be created.

Has anyone here encountered this kind of behavior on you LB, that LB works on FO mode but NO on RR mode.

Thanks a bunch

[markbenson]

With Horizon View, the load balancer affinity options should be set so that the secondary protocols always go to the same server as the primary protocol.

Horizon Client primary protocol is the initial XML-API HTTPS connection on TCP port 443. After successful authentication, a series of secondary protocols are made:

1. The tunnel connection is made also using HTTPS on 443.

2. Blast on port 8443 (or 443 with Access Point).

3. PCoIP on TCP 4172 and UDP 4172.

If you simply set up round-robin for these secondary protocols instead of affinity to the same server as the primary connection then it will fail. This is what you are seeing. Your tunnel connection is probably being misdirected to a server that knows nothing about the authenticated session of the primary connection, hence the error message you are seeing. Look at the documentation for your LB.

You can read more about affinity and the Horizon Client protocols and load balancing here - Load Balancing with VMware Access Point - although this document is about Access Point, the principles of LB affinity and description of Horizon Protocols is almost identical for Connection Server (CS) and Security Server (SS). The only difference is that with CS and SS, Blast protocol is on port 8443 whereas with Access Point it is on port 443.