The Cisco solution for TS2008 offers increased application availability, performance and security by leveraging the following technologies and services:
Application availability
The Cisco ACE product family offers Terminal Services application high availability by providing the following:
Server health monitoring—Continuously and intelligently monitors server availability
Server load balancing—Efficiently routes end-user remote desktop requests to the best available server
Network platform health monitoring—Ensures continuity of business operations through mirroring end user transaction states across pairs of network devices.
Application performance
The Cisco ACE and Cisco WAAS product families offer Terminal Services application performance improvement by providing the following:
WAN optimization—Provides intelligent caching, compression, and protocol optimization of the remote desktop protocol
Server offloading—Specialized hardware that offers greater processing efficiency for application optimization services listed below, which frees up server processing and memory for additional remote desktop sessions
Server load balancing—Substitutes for Microsoft Network Load Balancing
Secure Socket Layer (SSL) termination—Terminates 15,000 connections per second.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection management—Reduces the number of TCP connections to server
Server health monitoring—Ensures that connecting clients reach the most optimal terminal server
Application security
The Cisco ACE and Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) product families offer Terminal Services application security by providing the following:
SSL termination—Efficiently encrypts and decrypts SSL enabled traffic, which facilitates security services such as firewalls and the use of intrusion detection and prevention before traffic reaches the servers
End user access control—Provides Access Control Lists (ACL) to protect client-to-server traffic from worms and intruders that attack vulnerable open server ports not used by the application
