Network load balancing cluster windows server 2008

You may also email your feedback to us via the Email link in the upper left corner of this page. Open PowerShell on your machine through right-clicking and selecting Run as administrator. The following is a list of NLB cmdlets for the Beta release. Note that these are subject to change. PowerShell for NLB certainly has a lot of functionality, but to improve usability, extensive help and examples are built right into the utility.

Please refer to this in-box help when you use PowerShell. This is also an area where we would like your feedback — please let us know if there is anything which you cannot find or you believe was misleading. Once the new host settings are circulated through all cluster hosts, the new cluster host will be in a running state in the cluster. The second one is for private traffic between the nodes of a Web farm. For example, if the server is using an internal network for traffic to internal resources like the file server or Active Directory servers, this could be used for traffic between the nodes.

Connect to the host that will be part of the cluster, in this case the Web server. In the Host text box, type the name of the host, and then click Connect. On the Host Parameters page, select a value from the Priority unique host identifier drop-down list. Click Next to continue. On the Cluster Parameters page, in the Cluster operation mode area, click Unicast to specify that a unicast media access control MAC address should be used for cluster operations. On the Port Rules page, click Edit to modify the default port rules if you need advanced rules.

Otherwise, use the default. To add more hosts to the cluster, right-click the new cluster, and then click Add Host to Cluster. In this scenario the data is partitioned such that each node in the cluster is responsible for accessing different parts of the shared data. This is commonly used with database servers, with each node having access to different parts of the database data with no overlap a concept also known as shared nothing.

Windows Server Network Load Balancing clustering can be configured using either one or two network adapters in each node, although for maximum performance two adapters are recommended. In such a configuration one adapter is used for communication between cluster nodes the cluster adaptor and the other for communication with the outside network the dedicated adapter. Network Load Balancing may be configured on a port by port basis or range of ports. For each port three options are available to control the forwarding of the traffic:.

As such, the server application will typically maintain some form of session state during the client server transaction. Whilst this is not a problem in the case of a Single Host configuration described above, clearly problems may arise if a client is diverted to a different cluster node partway through a session since the new server will not have access to the session state.

Windows Server Network Load Balancing addresses this issue by providing a number of client affinity configuration options. Client affinity involves the tracking of both destination port and source IP address information to optionally ensure that all traffic to a specific port from a client is directed to the same server in the cluster.

The available Client affinity settings are as follows:. The first step in building a load balanced cluster is to install the Network Load Balancing feature on each server which is to become a member of the cluster. This can be achieved by starting the Server Manager tool, selecting Features from the left panel and then clicking on the Add Features link.

In the list of available features, select Network Load Balancing and click on Next followed by Install. Network Load Balancing may also be installed from a command prompt with elevated privileges right click on the command prompt in the Start menu and select Run as administrator by running the servermanagercmd -install nlb command.

For example:. Once loaded, the manager will appear as shown in the following figure:. Note that the account must be a member of the administrators group. If default credentials are configured, the user will be prompted for account and password information each time a connection to a cluster node is established.

To begin the cluster creation process, right click on the Network Load Balancing Clusters entry in the left panel of the manager window and select the New Cluster menu option. This will display the New Cluster connection dialog. In this dialog, enter either the name or IP address of the first server to be included in the load balanced cluster and press the Connect button to establish a connection to that server.

If the connection is successful the first server will be listed as shown below:. Clicking Next will display a warning that DHCP will be turned off for the network adapter of the specified host and that any necessary gateway information will need to be configured manually using the server's network connection properties dialog accessible from the Control Panel.

Subsequently, the Host Parameters screen will appear as shown below:. The Priority unique host ID is a number between 1 and 32 and serves two purposes.