Logging into a specific server in a terminal server farm

Question

We have several terminal server farms and in each farm we have the need for 1 user to always log into a specific server in the farm.   This is due to a little piece of sortware that is required for a device that only this one user has and
the fact the it is licensed to only one server.   The user must use that server for it to work.  I want to include this server in the farm because it seems silly to have a server for only one user.    How can I point one PC/user
to the same server in the farm all the time?  We are using the Connection Broker and NLB which seems to work just fine for all other users. 
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi Steve,
What operating system version are you running on your servers?  Server 2008 R2?  Server 2012?
When you configure a RDS farm to be load-balanced by the connection broker, all servers in the unique farm are intended to have the exact same applications installed.  The idea is the RDCB can redirect users to different servers as needed to balance
the load, and that you may take any particular server (or servers, if you have enough) offline and your farm will still work.
Now, there are always exceptions and I understand it would be nice if you could assign a user/app to a specific server to handle a case like yours.  For example, you would understand this particular user or app would not be load-balanced or highly
available and if the one server was down it would not work, but other users/RemoteApps would be load-balanced as usual.  This is
not a feature of the current versions of RDS.
To do what you want the "best way" would require writing a custom plugin for RDCB.  In your custom plugin you would specifiy the load-balancing logic.  For example, when one of the "special" users logs on, your logic would direct them to the
correct specific server, but when a regular user logs on you would allow the normal RDCB load-balancing logic to apply.  Please see here for more information:
Terminal Services Session Broker Plug-in reference
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/cc644962(v=vs.85).aspx
Besides writing a custom plugin I suggest you consider the following workarounds:
1. Instead of running the app under RDSH, run it in a Win7/Win8 VM pool if possible.  Either a pool of identical VMs or assign each user that needs to run the app to a dedicated VM.  Downside of this is added complexity, licensing for VDI,
and an increase in hardware resources required to run the VMs.
2. Have the user connect to the server using /admin.  You can change the permissions so that a specific group may connect using a /admin connection, without them being administrators.  Downside of this is that some features
of RDSH are not present when connected as an administrative RDP session, and only two Active admin sessions are permitted.
3. If running Server 2008 R2 you could set the server so that it does not participate in load balancing and have the users that need to run this special app connect directly to the server's ip address instead of to the farm name.  Downside of this
is that you will get more uneven load distribution, however, it may not be that bad if you are balancing your initial connections using NLB and you have all of your regular users connecting to the farm name as usual.
4. Have a separate server in each farm (not joined to the farm) just for this one app.  If possible they could be VMs with not much resources dedicated to each.  I know this is what you did not want to do, but I mention it because an
extra base Windows Server license, one for each farm, is likely less additional cost than licensing the special software on
all servers.  If you can run the app in VMs then the additional hardware cost of doing it this way is reduced.
-TP