NLB Affinity - Are sticky sessions required?

[BL460c]

Hi,

I have 2x VMware View Connection Servers using NLB in Multicast mode

It seems to work fine, however I am trying to figure out how it would be possible for one of the Connection Servers to be placed into maintenance mode (for Windows Patching)

Should I either

a) have the Affinity set to Single (As close as NLB can do Sticky Sessions)

b) have the Affinity set to none, will this work? how are the view sessions handled

When I then drainstop on one of the Connection Servers, how can I get the existing sessions to switch over to the other connection server gracefully so I can perform maintenance, reboot and re-converge the Connection Server?

We currently don't have a budget for a Proper Hardware load balancer, so I am either going to use NLB or look at that SUSE appliance with HAProxy.

Whichever can meet my requirements better and provide no single point of failure.

[markbenson]

You need to support session affinity to ensure that subsequent session requests from the client go to the same Connection Server each time.

If you want to do maintenance, you can set your load balancer to direct connections to the other Connection Server and then wait until all sessions from the first have gone. By default, sessions last a max of 10 hours so you won't need to wait longer than this.

Mark

[BL460c]

Is that the same that would apply for a Hardware Load balancer in front?

Is there anyway to get a transparent cutover from one to another connection server

[markbenson]

BL460c wrote:

Is that the same that would apply for a Hardware Load balancer in front?

Yes

Is there anyway to get a transparent cutover from one to another connection server

No