Nimbostratus
Nimbostratus
in answer to your questions
2.GTM redirects end user connections to a virtual server based on the DNS Name"
Sounds like you have a different DNS name per Server you want to hit?
Yes, we will have a different DNS name for every Terminal Server in the environment. Currently we have a more traditional approach, where there are several pools of Terminal servers hosted behind a virtual server on the LTM. The architecture is due to change so that every server will be configured differently for each customer and will need to be accessible via a unique DNS name as only a single server will be used per customer there would be no need for persistence or load balancing. The servers will be in several groups of ESX hosts which will be dependant on a NFS Datastore and data centre, so we need an automated way of failing over all connections (at the same data centre or using the same storage should a dependency fail. I'm happy to use Icontrol to automate the failover or service monitors, but the requirement is to be able to fail over as a unit to avoid having to manually failover a large number of hosts. The Failover on the storage is likely to be automatic, but manually initiated, so If we could simply disable something on the LTM/GTM to initiate the failover that may also be an acceptable solution.
4. GTM is used to automate the failover between a standby data centre.
3. We will still need to failover the connections en masse. All the Servers will still have the same dependencies (storage, Data centre etc).
If one node fails, we will use VMWares failover functionality to failover locally, the node will come up on another esx host with the same IP address, so we would not failover DNS in this scenario. However, If we lost a Datacentre or the storage we would need a way of failing all nodes dependant on these to another datacentre. So in short there is no requirement to fail individual hosts, but any hosts dependant on a data centre or storage node.
thanks for your help so far