NLB in Windows 2012 / 2012R2 Servers Notes
1) Network Load Balancing or NLB
- distributes network traffic across servers
- provides reliability & performance
2) servers in NLB cluster are hosts. Each host run seperate copy of server applications
NLB distributes incoming requests across hosts in cluster
3) NLB supports HA, Scalability & Manageability
4) For HA, NLB
- detect a host fails or goes offline & recover
- balance network load when hosts are added / removed
- recover & distribute workload within 10s
5) For Scalability, NLB
- balance load requests across cluster
- support up to 32 computers (hosts) in 1 cluster
- balance server load requests across multiple hosts in cluster
- add hosts when load increase without cluster to fail
- remove host from cluster when load goes down
- high performance & pipelining (requests sent to NLB w/o waiting for response to previous request)
6) For Manageability, NLB
- manage & configure multiple clusters using NLB manager
- load balancing for port(s) using port mgmt rules
- define diff port rules
- direct all client requests to single host
- block network access to certain ports
- igmp support to control switch port flooding
- remote start, stop and control nlb actions
- NLB events in windows event log
7) h/w requirements
- all hosts in same subnet
- no restrictions on network adapters
- all network adapters --> multicast or unicast. No mixed mode
- unicast mode, network adapter must support changing MAC address
8) s/w requirements
- tcp
- static ip
- Reference
- wong chee tat :)
