How Parallels RAS Network Load Balancer Works
Last updated on August 17, 2021
Why Use a Network Load Balancer?
Mission-critical corporate applications such as a transactions database, an intranet, and other key functions must run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Networks must also have the ability to scale performance to handle large volumes of client requests without creating unwanted delays.
For these reasons, IT managers distribute workload onto groups of servers. This procedure is called clustering. Clustering enables a group of independent servers to be managed as a single system for higher availability, easier manageability, and greater scalability. The process of distributing traffic between the different servers in order to provide failover support for critical applications is called network load balancing. A network load balancer provides scalability and high availability to services such as Terminal Services, and virtual desktop and application delivery.
Scalability. The network load balancer scales the performance of a server-based program by distributing its client requests across multiple servers. As traffic increases, additional servers can be added.
High availability. The network load balancer provides high availability by automatically detecting the failure of a server and repartitioning client traffic among the remaining servers while providing users with continuous service.
Network Load Balancer: Servers and Gateways
With the increase in remote workers, companies often make corporate applications available to their employees on the move, so that the data center is hit by connection requests from devices outside the company perimeter. Depending on user credentials, access to applications and desktops is guaranteed. The requests can be dispatched between the gateways based on specific policies, by IP address, workload or round-robin. It is widely accepted that the most reliable is balancing based on workload. It is possible to address users’ requests to the gateways with a lower workload, to gain constant high availability. The traffic can be distributed following the network load balancer used for the servers.
Parallels RAS provides a fully comprehensive solution that covers load balancing for servers and gateways at the same time. The High Availability Load Balancing (HALB) feature within Parallels RAS has been extended to deal with high availability environments when distributing connections to gateways. In this manner, the terminal server redundancy gained by checking server availability is also extended to the gateways, therefore providing an additional layer of redundancy.
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