Terminal Server NLB for physical & virtual machines

[DLevine]

Hey all,

I have been looking around at other posts and white papers on this, but am not totally clear.

I have a Windows 2003 Terminal Services NLB cluster that includes 3 servers. Two of the Terminal Servers are physical, and I have a new one that is virtual.

All access to this cluster is internal, so nothing is traversing a router.

The NLB cluster operation mode is setup as unicast, and had a port rule for 3389, both TCP and UDP, and has no affinity.

The cluster has been working fine for the past week since I put in the new virtual Terminal Server. Last night I powered down the virtual server to add a 2nd proc to it. Since then, the cluster only sees the virtual machine, and not the physical machines. Essentially, the two physicals are not reachable on the network at all (no response to pings on their individual IP addresses, etc).

I have read that I need to change the cluster operation mode to multicast, but I am not sure why - and if that would even fix my problem...

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,

D

[ProPenguin]

Honestly from a person who has been fighting a terminal server cluster for a few years now look into 2X.  2X.com has a great network loadbalancing software for terminal servers.  The price doesnt seem to be too bad either.  It will actually load balance based on proccessing availability and memory availability.  Its worth a look if nothing else.  Other wise to fix your current setup I would just resetup the cluster.  That seems to fix windows cluster issues when I have them.

Hope this helps.

[DLevine]

Thanks for the response.

Since the cluster setup is very simple I may just do that this weekend - tear it down and set it up from scratch. I just find it interesting that the problem has only occurred since the introduction of the virtual machine to the cluster. It has been running properly for... oh... 6 years! This was leading me to belive that I missed something to properly configure it...

Thanks!

D

[AlbertWT]

Hi,

I got similar situation, so can you share here with us what needs to be reconfigured ?