Remote desktop farm

tritron

I had configured dell 860 with xen and four server 2008 running. I have pfsense configured to access rdp to one box. I now that I can change rdp ports and use nat to allow access to them. I only have single ip address I wonder if there is a way to configure pfsense to allow number of users to access rdp farm. I would like to have system that redirect rdp users to avaiable xen instance. Is there linux base proxy or pfsense settings that redirect users to avaiable instance

Metu69salemi

you can use portforward for that
as an example:


forward outbound 3089 to server1 inbound 3389
forward outbound 3090 to server2 inbound 3389
forward outbound 3091 to server3 inbound 3389
forward outbound 3092 to server4 inbound 3389

and when connection to that specific server from outside use yourpublicip:3089 or :3090 or :3091 or 3092

matguy

Nothing automatic that I can think of, short of just making one of your 2008 instances in to a Terminal Server, but there may be licensing issues in the way. You could probably use Terminal Services Gateway or Remote Desktop Services to show a list of servers they can connect to, which doesn't help the automatic direction, but a nice list might be easier to your end users than typing in port numbers. I don't remember how the licensing works on that, though, and I don't know your licensing arrangements.

If you're looking for something that detects the number of logins to each individual server instance and direct users to open slots, you're either looking for some kind of 3rd party application or building something yourself. Otherwise, your users will have to check the individual ports for open slots, or if you only have 8 (or fewer) users, try to get them to always use the same port ID and split them up 2 to an instance.

cmb

The built in server load balancer, or haproxy, could potentially accomplish that depending on your exact requirements. That can distribute load based on the number of active TCP connections, which should work fine for RDP in most circumstances, though reconnections when the client drops could be an issue. haproxy has the ability to work around that with source hashing and potentially some of its other config options.

tritron

I belive I had found perect solution http://www.jasemccarty.com/blog/?p=101
crossroads may provide what I need.