First published on CloudBlogs on Nov, 18 2014
Hello everyone, this is Clark Nicholson from the Remote Desktop team. I am writing today to let you know that the
Azure Load Balancer now supports client IP affinity
which resolves the previous incompatibility with the RD Gateway role service. You can now deploy a Remote Desktop Gateway farm in Azure virtual machines within a single cloud service and availability set. This is good news because it simplifies your deployment and increases the availability of your desktop and app hosting services in Azure using Remote Desktop Services (RDS).
For those of you unfamiliar with Azure terminology, a cloud service is a container for one or more virtual machines you create. You can load balance multiple virtual machines by placing them in the same cloud service. A farm of RD Gateway virtual machines in the same cloud service will have a single DNS name for accessing from the Internet. An availability set is a group of virtual machines that are deployed across fault domains and update domains. When you assign an RD Gateway farm’s virtual machines to the same availability set, this ensures that the RD Gateway functionality is not affected by a malfunctioning single point of failure, like a network switch going down.
You may recall that to work-around the incompatibility between the Azure Load Balancer and RD Gateway, our previous documentation recommended that you deploy RD Gateway virtual machines in two separate cloud services and then use Traffic Manager to load balance between them. However, this meant that you could not assign the RD Gateway virtual machines to the same availability set. Now, this work-around is no longer necessary and we have just published updated versions of the
Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide
and
Remote Desktop Web Access and Gateway Farm Deployment
guide. These documents are part of a larger set of guidance on
Azure Desktop Hosting
using Remote Desktop Services.
For additional background information, please see
Remote Desktop Services
and
Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines
.
Note: Questions and comments are welcome. However, please DO NOT post a request for troubleshooting by using the comment tool at the end of this post. Instead, post a new thread in the
RDS & TS forum
. Thank you.
