What is RDP/RDS Load Balancing?
RDS (Remote Desktop Services) and RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) are industry-leading protocols by Microsoft enabling access to virtualized environments or services running on a remote desktop/server using a graphical user interface (GUI).
Users can use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection tools to connect to a remote computer or server over the internet to gain full access to the desktop environment. Remote Desktop Services (RDS) is an industry-leading service/application virtualization platform. It facilitates efficiency and flexibility regarding remote virtual application delivery and secures virtual applications/services for users to access remotely.
What can you achieve with RDP load balancing?
Snapt's high-powered load balancers ensure the performance, reliability, and security for Remote Gateway, Connection Broker, and terminal servers. Snapt is genuinely a total high-availability solution for remote desktops and services. Snapt comes pre-configured to load balance RDS/RDP and provides additional value by enabling scalability, high-availability, and ease of management to clients who wish to load-balance their RDP/RDS services.
Layer 7 RDP load balancing
Layer 7 balancing enables Snapt to be more than a standard TCP forwarding balancer. Layer 7 load balancing allows the intelligent handling of connections based on specific criteria to ensure the clients' best experience and increase ease of scale.
- Microsoft Connection Brokers: load balance Remote Desktop Connection Brokers and multiple Web Access Servers and Gateway Servers.
- RDS Servers: load balance your Remote Desktop servers directly without any Brokers
- Gateway: load balance secure HTTPS data if you are using Remote Desktop Gateway.
Resilient Global Load Balancing
Snapt includes a Global Server Load Balancer (GSLB), which enables RDP load-balancing based on geographical location and provides RDP failover between different locations.
Better Security and Anomaly Detection
Snapt Nova can protect your RDP/RDS infrastructure from brute-force attacks, botnets, and control servers. Using a machine learning engine and AI logic, Nova can monitor and analyze every single request that gets passed to your remote desktop infrastructure, looking for performance issues, traffic spikes, and potential threats.
Monitoring and Alerts
Snapt can send alerts via email, Slack, and webhooks (enabling a broad range of platforms). The entire platform can also be monitored and even controlled via a full REST API.
Weights and Backups
Configure weighted load balancer routing and backup policies for your critical services, ensuring the most optimal remote desktop service is always used.
High Availability
Most Snapt load balancer licenses come with HA (high availability), ensuring redundancy and dramatically increasing RDP reliability.
RDP-cookies
RDP cookies are used to assure you are load-balancing based on individual identities. Like source hashing, where you can balance based on IPs, RDP cookies balances based on RDP identity. The cookie contains all information required to find the server in the list of available servers.
Ease of Use
Snapt offers easy-to-use wizards to automatically set up RDP load balancing optimization, compression, and SSL encryption. With a few clicks, you can deploy a predefined Snapt RDP load balancer into your cloud, VM, container infrastructure, or traditional environment.
Snapt has quick and easy wizards which allow you to set up load balancing between as many RDS/RDP servers as you require, and many more advanced options are available for the perfect set-up.
Rest easy knowing that thousands of customers run Snapt on Microsoft and Azure infrastructure.
Watch our CEO give an introduction on Nova RDP/RDS implementations: