Deploying HAProxy 1.4.24 to load-balance MS Terminal Services on CentOS 6

HAProxy is an open source, free, veryfast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing and proxy for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is particularly suited for very high traffic web sites and powers quite a number of the world's most visited ones. Over the years it has become the de-facto standard opensource load balancer, is now shipped with most mainstream Linux distributions, and is often deployed by default in cloud platforms.

The content of this blog entry is taken from Load balancing Windows Terminal Server – HAProxy and RDP Cookies or Microsoft Connection Broker

 In this blog entry, we will put in a sample working haproxy configuration to load balance between terminal services  

 Step 1: Install haproxy

# yum install haproxy

Step 2: Modify /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg  

#---------------------------------------------------------------------
# Global settings
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
global
# to have these messages end up in /var/log/haproxy.log you will
# need to:
#
# 1) configure syslog to accept network log events. This is done
# by adding the '-r' option to the SYSLOGD_OPTIONS in
# /etc/sysconfig/syslog
#
# 2) configure local2 events to go to the /var/log/haproxy.log
# file. A line like the following can be added to
# /etc/sysconfig/syslog
#
# local2.* /var/log/haproxy.log
#
log 127.0.0.1 local2

chroot /var/lib/haproxy
pidfile /var/run/haproxy.pid
maxconn 4500
user haproxy
group haproxy
daemon
stats socket /var/lib/haproxy/stats

#---------------------------------------------------------------------
# common defaults that all the 'listen' and 'backend' sections will
# use if not designated in their block
#---------------------------------------------------------------------
defaults
timeout queue 1m
timeout connect 60m
timeout client 60m
timeout server 60m

# -------------------------------------------------------------------
# [RDP Site Configuration]
# -------------------------------------------------------------------
listen cattail 155.69.57.11:3389
mode tcp
tcp-request inspect-delay 5s
tcp-request content accept if RDP_COOKIE
persist rdp-cookie
balance leastconn
option tcpka
option tcplog
server win2k8-1 192.168.6.48:3389 weight 1 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 3
server win2k8-2 192.168.6.47:3389 weight 1 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 3
option redispatch

listen stats :1936
mode http
stats enable
stats hide-version
stats realm Haproxy\ Statistics
stats uri /

Information:

• timeout client and timeout server is put at 6 hours (360m) to keep idle RDP session established
• persist rdp-cookie and balance rdp-cookie. These instruct HAProxy to inspect the incoming RDP connection for a cookie; if one is found, it is used to persistently direct the connection to the correct real server
• The 2 tcp-request lines help to ensure that HAProxy sees the cookie on the initial request.

  Reference:

• Load balancing Windows Terminal Server – HAProxy and RDP Cookies or Microsoft Connection Broker
• Deploying an HAProxy Load Balancer on CentOS 6