How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

re: How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

Gregg O'Brien — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:39:29 GMT

Hey everyone,

Sorry for not replying sooner.

DC1233, the hotfix that Johan (thanks for posting that Johan) posted should address your issue. Have you tried it?

Brajesh, you would need to have a load balancer located internally as well and that load balancer will have to be able to load balance ISATAP addresses and/or native IPv6 addresses as well, between the two DirectAccess servers.

Gregg

re: How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

Brajesh Panda — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:06:42 GMT

Did you able to set up manage out connection using external hardware load balancer? Or any Idea how to do this?

re: How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

Johan — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:30:18 GMT

Hi,

I see that there are some complaints here about the fact that the DNS stops working when the load balancer is inplace. you can see that the DA connected clients nolonger can ping the IPv6 DNS64 address nor use it for name resolution while it still works perfect on the DA server it self.

Had this issue as well and started a supportcase on it, while the case was running a patch was released for it: support.microsoft.com/.../en-us

I hope that it fixes your problem as well.

Rgrds

Johan

re: How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

dc1233 — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 19:06:36 GMT

Gregg,

I'm having a very similar issue. We are using 3rd party load balancing but I was receiving the same error message Jared was receiving. I followed the steps you had listed below, but that did not seem to help. I then disabled Load Balancing in the Remote Access Management Console as a single system behind my F5 was previously working. Now after disabling Load Balancing, I have a DNS error on the Operations Status page and it says the cause is "server responsivness" Testing DNS resolution from the server, everything appears normal although I don't get a NAT'd IPv6 address as I previously did. Any thoughts here?

PS C:\Windows\system32> Get-NetDnsTransitionConfiguration

State : Enabled

AcceptInterface : {prd-directaccess-internal-int}

SendInterface : {prd-directaccess-internal-int}

OnlySendAQuery : True

LatencyMilliseconds : 300

AlwaysSynthesize : False

ExclusionList : {removed}

PrefixMapping : {removed}

re: How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

Jared — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 13:59:49 GMT

Hi Gregg,

Thanks for the response.

I checked my commands with yours and the outcome of both are the same however just to ensure there are no discrepencies I have used yours but still end up with the same problem for clients.

The only difference in my config I think is that I'm using a single NIC.

So yesterday I decided I would remove all the config and switch the topology to using two NIC's. I put back the exact same configuration and this time is works. I had wiped and started over again several times with the single NIC configuration so pretty sure it wasn't something with the setup but rather an issue with using a single NIC with an external load balancer.

Maybe something for Microsoft to look into further. There's obviously an issue as well the AcceptInterface value being incorrect when enabling Load Balancing.

Anyway, thanks for your help with this. Got there in the end.

Jared

re: How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

Gregg O'Brien — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 02:29:49 GMT

Hi Jared,

The commands I used were the following:

To disable Duplicate Address Detection:

netsh int ipv6 set int <InterfaceID> dadtransmits=0

To change DNS64 :

set-netDnsTransitionConfiguration –acceptinterface <interfaceID>

Upon running the above commands and a quick reboot of each server, connectivity worked as you would expect. I reproduced this on a servers with two interfaces.

Gregg

re: How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

Jared — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 12:31:55 GMT

Hi Gregg,

Thanks for coming back to me. Sorry, I thought you were confirming something first.

Have used the following commands to set as suggested - perhaps you could confirm if they are the same ones you are using?

Set-NetIPInterface –InterfaceAlias (Get-RemoteAccess).InternalInterface –AddressFamily IPv6 –DadTransmits 0

Set-NetDnsTransitionConfiguration –AcceptInterface (Get-RemoteAccess).InternalInterface

But I still have the same issue. In the remote access client status page, the 'Total Bytes In' for the client continuously increases but 'Total Bytes Out' never changes from 0 and it never completes the connection process. The logs on the client say there is still an issue with DNS - Windows is unable to resolve DNS names for probes.

Are you getting complete connectivity after your changes? In these tests, are you using a single interface for the servers or multiple?

Thanks,

Jared

re: How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

Gregg O'Brien — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 03:29:30 GMT

Hi Jared,

Did disabling duplicate address detection and resetting the DNS64 AcceptInterface parameter to the internal interface on the DirectAccess servers not correct the issue? I tested a few times and it seemed to work. I am curious to know if you are experiencing something different.

Thanks,

Gregg

re: How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

Jared — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:26:55 GMT

Hi Gregg,

Just wondering where you were able to get up to with this?

Thanks,

Jared

re: How to Configure DirectAccess in Windows Server 2012 to Work with an External Hardware Load Balancer

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