Tarantella Administration Guide > Arrays, servers and load balancing > Introducing webtop and emulator session load balancing

Introducing webtop and emulator session load balancing

Webtop session load balancing

Webtop session load balancing is concerned with choosing a Tarantella server to log in to.

Users may log in to any Tarantella server in an array to see the same webtop, and to start or resume the same applications.

Webtop session load balancing happens before the first connection is made to Tarantella. You can use a number of mechanisms to choose an appropriate Tarantella server. For example:

• Round-robin or Dynamic DNS. You give your users one URL to use for Tarantella (for example, http://www.indigo-insurance.com/tarantella), and configure your DNS server to choose a Tarantella server in the array. Any server may be chosen.
• Allocate different Tarantella servers to different departments, and give one URL to each department.

No webtop session load balancing solution is supplied with Tarantella. You can use any third-party solution to choose a Tarantella server.

Emulator session load balancing

Emulator session load balancing is concerned with choosing an array member to host an emulator session.

An emulator session requires a protocol engine, which communicates with the user's client device and with the application server running the application. A protocol engine may run on any array member: not necessarily the same array member that hosts the user's webtop session.

Tarantella can automatically balance emulator sessions across the array. The more array members you have, the less the load on each. You configure the algorithm used for emulator session load balancing on the Load Balancing Properties panel of Array Manager.