Network Load Balancing

In this post I'll cover the basics of setting up Network Load Balancing with the free Feature included with Windows Server 2008. The goal with this is that you can take one server down without the users noticing it, and of course to balance the load between them for best performance.

Read more about NLB on technet.

In this scenario I have two SharePoint 2010 Servers in one Farm (AUNE-SH01 and AUNE-SH02). And I'll set it up the cluster to use portal.aune.local at IP 192.168.2.105. 

First you need to activate the feature on both servers, this is done with Server Manager.

Install NLB

     Open Server Manager and add feature:

     Install the Network Load Balancing Feature

Repeat this on both servers

Configure the Network Load Balancer

This part can be done on either of the two servers.

1. Open the Network Load Balancing Manager:

2. Right-click the cluster node and click; New Cluster

 3. Type in the name of one off the servers and click connect:

4. Chose an IP for the new cluster, in this case 192.168.2.105 is used, just make sure its an available IP.

5. The parameter for the cluster I have entered a Full Internet name and changed the mode to Multicast.

6. Under the port rules you can specify ports that will be balanced, I didn't change this. But in a production environment you could for example balance port 80/443.

7. Now the cluster is in place and the second server needs to be added, AUNE-SH02. Right click the new cluster and click Add Host To Cluster.

Configure the DNS

You'll need a new record for the cluster, 192.168.2.105. 

Open the DNS Manager, find your Forward Lookup Zone and right-click and New Host:

Configure IIS Bindings

Not done yet, the IIS server needs to be edited on both servers to set correct bindings.

Open the IIS Manager, find your SharePoint site and right-click and then Edit Bindings...:

Edit the entry already there and change the host name to the new portal.aune.local:

Configure SharePoint

The final part, configure the Alternate Access Mappings. 

Open Central Administration and find Configure alternate access mappings under System Settings:

Edit Public URLs for your collection, this example the SharePoint -80 is used.

Change the Default value to http://portal

That's it, your should now be available to connect to http://portal.aune.local.

Note: Just to be sure, restart both IIS servers.


In a later post I'll cover failover clustering the SQL server.