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Microsoft Announces Session Based Terminal Server Load Balancing In Longhorn

Thursday, 26 April 2007 by Michel Roth

After announcing TS Easy Print, Microsoft made an even bigger announcement at BriForum Chicago: Longhorn will have Load Balancing! It goes to show, that Microsoft thinks really highly of BriForum A big compliment to Brian as far as I'm concerned! The Load Balancing capabilities will be included in Longhorn Beta 3 for the first time.

Notice that I'm not talking about Network Load Balancing. Load Balancing in Longhorn will actually be usable Load Balancing. It is build into the new Session Directory renamed to the Session Broker (I wonder if they picked this VDI-like name on purpose...).

This Load Balancing will of course not be total solution. It fits nicely into the whole "you can suffice with just Longhorn Terminal Server in low complexity environments". The limitations are:

You can not Load Balance Remote Programs.... just Published Desktops
The load balancing is based on sessions only. So, no advanced load evaluators.

So basically the full feature set of Longhorn Terminal Server now looks like this:

TS Gateway
TS Remote Programs
TS Web Access
WRSM For Terminal Servers
TS Easy Print
TS Session Broker Load Balancing

Although the solution is clearly not everything one would hope for, I think Microsoft is making a gigantic step forward in making Terminal Server interesting for more and more companies. I've been bugging Microsoft about offering decent Load Balancing as long as I can remember and now they've decided to go ahead with it. Way to go Microsoft!