Companies look to provide access to mission-critical applications effectively and efficiently. For advanced infrastructure setups with a large number of concurrent users, the main challenge lies in delivering high availability and fault tolerance solutions that can keep up with the increased demand.
How does your business handle remote access for external contractors? That’s a question many are asking today as companies are relying more and more on contract workers, third-party vendors, and international staff augmentation strategies.
Why use Load Balancing in Thinfinity® Workspace?
When one server cannot manage to keep up with the needed resources, Load Balancing comes into play. Too many concurrent connections to applications that handle a lot of graphics, sound, or other elements that require high availability, may cause an overload.
Thinfinity Workspace provides components allowing you to distribute the workload across multiple Windows sessions and servers. You can scale application availability in instances, user accesses, and failover scenarios. To achieve optimal resource utilization and avoid server overload.
Some of the benefits of load balancing are:
- Avoid overload by distributing the connections among different servers
- Minimize response time
- Improve reliability and redundancy
- Provide failover control
If you conclude that your environment would benefit from load balancing, Thinfinity Workspace allows you to choose between two possible architectures. This decision is essential in hardware scheme planning and system configuration to work in a distributed way.
Scenario 1: One Gateway and multiple Broker Servers
In this simple scenario, a single Gateway distributes the connection load between several Broker Servers.
Scenario 2*: Multiple Gateways and multiple Broker Servers
This second scheme comprises multiple Broker Servers, multiple Gateways, and the DNS Server, its domain name associated with all the available Gateways’ IPs.
*Note: this method requires a round-robin DNS configuration and is not exemplified in this tutorial.
Configuring Load Balancing in Thinfinity® Workspace
You first need to install the gateway component on your ‘Gateway Server’, then your broker component on your ‘Broker Server’.
- Gateway Server
Open the Thinfinity InstallShield Wizard, then click on ‘Next’:
Select ‘I accept the terms in the license agreement’ and click on ‘Next’:
Select ‘Reverse Gateway Only’ and click on ‘Next’:
Choose a ‘Destination Folder’ and click on ‘Next’:
Now that everything is set up, click on ‘Install’:
- Broker Server
Open the Thinfinity InstallShield Wizard, then click on ‘Next’:
Select ‘I accept the terms in the license agreement’ and click on ‘Next’:
Select ‘Broker and HTML5 Services’ and click on ‘Next’:
Choose a ‘Destination Folder’ and click on ‘Next’:
Now that everything is set up, click on ‘Install’:
To guarantee that the Load Balancing environment performs appropriately, you should look for the following items:
- The Network ID
- IP Bindings (in the Gateway Manager)
- The Gateway URL (in the Broker Server)
The Network ID
The ‘Network ID’ must be the same across all gateway(s) and broker(s).
You can modify the Network ID to any value since it doesn’t follow a specific format:
IP Bindings
In the General tab, you would need to configure the Port and Bindings for the user (browser client) to reach Thinfinity Workspace.
You can do so by selecting the default connection and clicking on ‘Edit’.
For instance, the address ‘http://Server_IP:9443’ is based on the settings below:
Check the box ‘Enable external access in Windows Firewall’ as well.
The Gateway URL (in the Broker Server)
Now that the gateway is configured, add the gateway(s) URLs on the Broker Manager:
Configuring the License Server Manager
When installing Thinfinity Workspace Server in a Load Balancing environment, you need to use our ‘License Server Manager’ to pool the licenses between the back-end broker servers. You can see how this is configured below:
Open the License Server Manager on the machine in which the gateway is installed.
On this screen, click ‘Add’, and a menu will open, where you would need to select ‘Thinfinity® Workspace 6.0’:
Check the ‘Activate a Serial Number online’ option and press ‘Next’:
Here, complete the fields ‘E-Mail’ and ‘Serial’ and press ‘Next’:
After the registration is complete, hit ‘Finish’:
Configuring the License tab
On the ‘License’ tab, configure the email address and serial number registered on the License Server Manager.
On the Primary Field, write the licensing server URL, the URL of the app’s installed server, and add port 7443.
Example: https://Server_IP:7443.
Select the ‘Use licensing server’ box, click ‘Apply’, and restart the Thinfinity service.
Verifying the server connection to the gateway
To verify if the Broker Servers are connected to the Gateway Servers, you can check the log file by clicking on ‘Show Log’:
It should say something like:
Server started. Listening HTTP on port 8443.
Broker: Connecting to http://127.0.0.1:8443/
Broker: Registered on http://127.0.0.1:8443/
Web Server: Connecting to http://127.0.0.1:8443/
Web Server: Registered on http://127.0.0.1:8443/
There are a few things to take into account when using Load Balancing:
All the Broker Servers have to share the same profiles. To this end, you can copy the database file ‘profiles.bin’ and distribute it to all the servers. You’ll find this in the following path:
‘C:\ProgramData\Cybele Software\Thinfinity\Workspace\DB’
If you use One-Time-URL, you’d need to share the ‘Root Path’ for Temporary Folders. This will also ensure the users have consistency with their intermediate disk (ThinDisk) when they access files from the file manager or upload/download files:
Remember that if you only install the broker service on a server, you must register the license using the License Server Manager.
