View Load Balancer Query

[toon97]

I am in the process of rolling out a new View 5 environment......

The View system is going to consist of two completely independent environments, however users will only connect in to one shared address and the load balancer will decide where to go. The idea being that one environment can be upgraded/maintained in complete isolation, and users can continue to function on the other at any time by re-pointing the load balancer.

All of the desktops are going to be non-persistent, so it doesnt really matter which View environment the user hits. The only exception to this is as follows..........

• User A connects and hits environment A at say 9AM. They disconnect and leave applications/documents open to go and work from home.
  
• User A then re-connects from home.
  
• If the load balancer directs them to envioronment A - all is well. However, here is the problem.
  
• If the load balancer takes them to environment B - they then have two destkops open and possibly conflicts with files.
  

So the question is, does anyone know of a load balancer that is effectively 'application aware', or is clever enough to direct the user to the environment they connected to earlier??? The company dont want to use the option to log off a user when they disconnect.

I suppose another question is, has anyone implemented a similar configuration, and how did you get around this issue.

Thanks in advance.

[mittim12]

So you have one external address that will handle multiple View environments and it's the load balance job to pick the correct View environment to send to?   

[toon97]

Hi there,

Yes that's exactly correct, the idea being one will always be on. The only way we can see it working is if we have two external hostnames (one for each evironment) then slpitting the users 50-50 and informing each which they should use. In case of problems with one we can quickly switch them to the other. This is very much plan B though!!

Any thoughts?

[mackemftm]

check out page 47

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/view-46-architecture-planning.pdf

[toon97]

Hi, the pod architecture simply load balances across several different connection servers (which are all linked). What we are intending is two seperate envrionments (with no link between them). This therefore doesnt fulfil the requirement unfortunately.

Thanks though.

[mackemftm]

Sounds like u need a f5 lb or cisco ace. Check out the VCE alwayson architecture.

David Owen