A little background on our setup if you will forgive me for getting a little long winded.
We are a Microsoft Terminal Services environment and have been for the past nine years. We started with 8 Windows 2000 servers using Citrix Metaframe to manage connectivity. We have approximately 300 users on our system. Most use thin-clients for connectivity to our terminal servers.
4th quarter 2008 we switched to a VMWare enterprise solution along with Server 2008. We have 12 Server 2008 vm's and continue to use our thin clients for connectivity. Our thin clients includes Neowares running either a linux or Microsoft CE operating system or a variety of other small x86 systems that PXE boot Thinstation linux and connect to our terminal servers using rdesktop. The majority of our thin clients are of the PXE boot variety.
We could not use Microsoft TS Session Broker because it requires MS RDP protocol 6+ which rdesktop does not support so we were forced to use Microsoft Network Load Balancing. We configured NLB with 2 clusters of 6 terminal servers.
Microsoft NLB added a multitude of problems in our organization. At best, NLB caused issues with sluggishness and nearly an inability to use Terminal Services Manager. At worst, NLB would cause an entire cluster to become inaccessible and drop connectivity of active sessions.
A co-worker turned me on to XR and after reading about it and talking about it for over a month we decided some testing was in order. I downloaded XR and compiled and installed on my laptop. I fired up XR from the command line and had several other co-workers in my IT dept point their terminal server client to my laptop. Connections were very fast and dispatch method was working at it should. I had some problems with the sessions disconnecting, but I knew it was probably something I could tweak.
We then decided to take it a step further. I created a 9.04 server vm and installed XR. I figured out what I needed to do with the xrctl.xml file and finished configuring my server the way I wanted it. I created a script in init.d to control xr and also configured it to start at boot. We then took half of our terminal servers out of NLB and I set them up in XR. Our department used the setup this way for a few days until we felt comfortable with XR..
I felt very confident in XR, so we completely uninstalled NLB and I added the remaining 6 terminal servers to the xml file.
The first day, in a full production environment, I felt a little nervous. Before long, however, I was completely at ease with XR and we were amazed at how well it works.
I'm using the lax stored ip dispatch method so we now have server affinity for disconnected sessions. We did not have this with NLB. Connections are quick and we have had no issues with disconnects or other problems with XR. Another plus is that Terminal Services Manager is now completely usable again.
We can't say enough about XR and how well it works. We are completely happy with it and very thankful for such a great product.
Here is a screenshot of XR in action:
