Resting in Peace

 

This blog has been dormant for quite a long time , i don't have any intention to revive it again. However you can visit my home page at http://www.farazmahmood.com  or my blog at wordpress http://farazmahmood.wordpress.com

c ya there

regards

faraz

Experience with NLB on window server 2003

Our product , Sharesoft Platform, is targeted for serving a large number of clients connecting to server for information retrieval. Sharesoft Platform , is a distributed application , with several components deployed across different servers. On the front there is a web service which communicates with the components to transfer the informaiton. This web service is accessed from client for information retireval. Initially we had only one web server, serving all the clients, and was under performing under high load.

So we decided to use NLB (Network Load balancing) to balance the load across multiple servers. We put three servers on the front , created a virtual server, and enable NLB on each of them. NLB requires same application running on all servers. Result was a drastic increas in performance.

Some Important Points:

• Use more then 1 NIC ,dedicating atleast one for NLB communication.
• In case of using only one NIC, use Multicast instead of UNICAST,with Multicast you can access other nodes in the cluster, a facility not available with UNICAST, (NLB updates mac addresses of NICs, depending upon Multicast or Unicast.
• Enable remote connectivity for easy access to other nodes , please review your security consideration before doing so.
• In case , if your working on the OS, which is deployed via Disk Images, then consider refershing the NIC, (re-installing the NIC etc..)
• I got 3 machines prepared using an Image which had cluster service enabled on it, I didn't want to use Cluster Service. Removing cluster settings proved to be a painful experience, finally I re-installed the NICs to resolve the issue.

regards

faraz