Terminal Server Maintenance

Posted By Sio on 02/08/2008 6:55 PM

 

Thanks for the response. Our users are third party partners who will be logging on from workstations outside of our administrative domain. We also have no control over what RDP clients they choose to use connect to the terminal servers so they may not necessarily be sending valid credntials through on first request. So it would seem we are using tokens passed from BigIP to the servers (or vice versa?).

 

Ideally we'd like to be able to "drainstop" RDP connections to a terminal server where by all new connections to the terminal server are stopped and existing connections (both active and disconnected) are left untouched. Our maintenance windows will be timed to take place when all users have logged off (either intentionally or forced log off due to idle timeout). This is possible with W2K3 terminal server if using Microsoft's Network Load Balancing (NLB) however this sort of defeats the purpose of having the BigIPs. (Microsoft's NLB is also frowned upon if not laughed at in our Telco environment).

 

I'd like to make this as semmless as possible for the end user so I'd like to stay away from disabling terminal services if possible (the terminal servers are used 24/7).

 

I'd be interested in finding out what other options are available. The BigIP's we have deployed are relatively new and we've had a few teething issues as our network teams get farmilair with the kit. Server maintenance is not one of their priorities so I'd like to be able to politely suggest some way of working in a maintenance plan that isn't going to be too painful for them to implement.

 

Thanks again for your response. It's great to see you guys have an active and thoroughly informative forum.

 

Sio