2X LoadBalancer

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Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen
Wednesday, 22 April 2009 00:00

Load balancing, increased security and redundancy for your Terminal Services

Since Microsoft Terminal Services Servers support many users, it's important to ensure that each Terminal Server is fully redundant and that the load is distributed between servers ensuring optimal service quality for users.

2X LoadBalancer for Terminal Services / Citrix allows you to easily load balance RDP/ICA sessions between Terminal Servers and provide fault tolerance. In addition, if you are allowing users to login from the internet, you can hide the back-end terminal services from the internet and just expose one single gateway machine - thereby drastically increasing security of your Terminal Servers.

2X LoadBalancer for Terminal Services / Citrix Features and Screenshots

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Resource based load balancing

2X LoadBalancer intelligently distributes the load on the Terminal Server machine which has the least usage. By retrieving information about the Terminal Servers' resource usage before establishing the connection, it is able to determine the best Terminal Server to handle the incoming session. By contrast, network load balancing in Windows Server simply distributes connections on a round robin basis, independent of the server load.

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Ensures redundancy of Terminal Servers

2X LoadBalancer first checks whether the terminal service of a particular server is responding before forwarding a connection to it. This allows you to ensure complete redundancy of each Terminal Server. By contrast, network load balancing in Windows Terminal Server just checks if the machine is alive: If the terminal service is not responding the user’s connection will be forwarded regardless, thus resulting in the user not being able to connect.

Reconnects users to disconnected sessions

2X LoadBalancer also checks if a user has a disconnected session on any of the servers and if so, reconnects them to the right server. No need for Windows 2000 Advanced Server or Windows 2003 Enterprise Server with session directory - Use standard server licenses and save thousands of dollars in licensing fees and hours of installation & administration time.

Firewall friendly, end to end SSL encryption

When used in SSL Gateway mode, the 2X LoadBalancer provides end-to-end SSL encryption to your terminal servers. This not only greatly enhances security but also gives you a firewall/proxy friendly solution with true SSL/HTTPS capabilities.

Supports Microsoft Terminal Services and Citrix servers

2X LoadBalancer is designed to work with Microsoft Terminal Services Servers (Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition, Windows 2000 Terminal Services and Windows 2003 Terminal Services) and Citrix MetaFrame (in case you do not want to spend the extra cost for XPa).

Other Features

Clientless solution - no need for any client to be installed
Less expensive and less complex to install and administer than Citrix.

System requirements

Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional or higher.

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Cambridgeshire Education ICT Selects 2X LoadBalancer

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Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen
Monday, 09 March 2009 11:56

90,000 Students and Staff Rely on 2X Software to Ensure High Terminal Server Access Availability!

Dallas, Irving, Texas, March 5, 2009 – 2X Software Ltd., the international developer of virtual computing software solutions, today announced that their 2X LoadBalancer solution is deployed by Cambridgeshire Education ICT to ensure high network availability for up to 70,000 students, 20,000 staff/Governors, with 17,000 of those users having remote access. The Cambridgeshire Education IT Service is part of Cambridgeshire County Council and offers the latest access technology and services to their 240 Cambridgeshire schools.

"We were careful to specify a robust system from the outset. In the two years we have been running the Centrally Hosted MIS system, we have only had to log into the 2X servers once monthly during scheduled downtime which shows just how reliable the 2X software has been," said Leon Cripps, System Support Manager, Education ICT Service, Cambridgeshire County Council. "The single most important benefit of using the software has been that it has fitted in seamlessly with our existing infrastructure without the need to retrain staff or change systems management software." continued Cripps.

Cambridgeshire Education ICT selected 2X Software’s LoadBalancer solution to load balance their terminal services farm and help with scheduled maintenance. The ability to install 2X on a Windows OS was a deciding factor in Cambridgeshire Education IT choosing 2X Software.

"This saved us from having to spend time learning how to support a new hardware appliance and allowed us to continue using our standard monitoring tools to give us continuity across all of our servers," commented Cripps.

2X Software offers tailor-made, easy-to-implement and cost efficient virtual computing solutions. The product range of 2X includes the 2X Application Server for Windows Terminal Services for the publishing of applications, the 2X LoadBalancer for Windows Terminal Services and Citrix-Server and the 2X ThinClientServer for Windows and Linux. Shortly, the 2X VirtualDesktopServer supporting VDI solutions like Hyper-V, VMware ESX, Virtual Iron and Parallels will be released.

"We are pleased that Cambridgeshire Education ICT chose 2X LoadBalancer with integrated resource-based load balancing. This 2X product is the perfect complement to Windows Terminal Servers. For the Council’s future plans, we hope to provide 2X VirtualDesktopServer - our new cost-effective connection broker - to deliver virtualized desktops and published applications to end users while keeping their servers resource balanced." explains Nikolaos Makris, CEO 2X Software Ltd.

For more information about Cambridgeshire Edcuation ICT case study, please visit the reviews page.