Your specs are probably a bit overkill for the app servers, and the web server only needs two CPUs and 4GB.
You can easily run the web server, broker, and license roles on one server. The RDS application servers will load balance themselves (using the connection broker for load information). IIRC, it works thusly: You create a DNS A record for each app server using the same name (say, rds.yourcompany.com). You create a certificate with that name as the subject, and install it on each app server. You tell the web server to build the RDP files using that name as the host. When your clients pull the RPD files down from the web server, they launch the RDP client which resolves "rds.yourcompany.com" to a random* application server. When the RDP client attempts to connect to that server, that server asks the connection broker which is the least loaded app server in the farm. The app server then "redirects" the RDP client to the aforementioned least-loaded server. * - DNS will use round-robin to hand these A records out UNLESS the client is on the same IP subnet as one of the servers. In that case, the DNS server will always put that server in the top of the list of returned addresses. But it doesn't matter -you aren't depending on round-robin for load balancing anyway - unless you have RDP clients that are too old to understand redirects. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Leone Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2013 3:16 PM To: [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: [NTSysADM] Advice designing RDS setup as VMs So I am about to start rolling out new servers for my RDS implementation. These are going to be Win 2012 servers. I have a published application that is needed by about 75 users total (altho probably not more than 40 or so simultaneously). These are VMware VMs, running on ESXi 5.1 U1. Here is what I am thinking: 3 session hosts. 4 vCPU, 2 cores. 12G. Application(s) installed on D: drive (there really will only be 1 application, which is a fat client front end to a database). 1 web access, 4 vCOU, 2 cores, 8G RAM. So, my questions (to start): 1. Should that web access host also be the session broker and licensing server? Or should the broker and licensing be on it's own server? 2. The web access host should be providing load balancing between the 3 session hosts. I don't know how to set that up. Anybody got any good newbie HOWTOs. etc? Thoughts? I think the session hosts should be configured properly (in terms of specs). I am not sure about the location of those supporting services (session broker and licensing). And the only load balancing I am familiar with is multiple NICs in one server, which is a whole different kind of load balancing. :-) This would be more "application load balancing", I guess. I'm told that 1 web access host should be enough. I have tested the application on smaller test VMs, and it works. Now I need to scale up. This is replacing a Citrix Presentation Manager 4.5 setup, BTW. I'm sure more details are required, and I'm happy to provide them.
