NLB no good?

I've been asked to create a Sharepoint 2007 MOSS farm web front with load balance. When I mention it to other techs, I'm told that Server 2003 NLB is unstable and shouldn't be used. I was told the same thing by someone else when I wanted to load balance CRM.

Is this the general consensis? What's the preferred method to load balance Sharepoint web front? I was told I should set up a DNS round robin.

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Comments

Claymoore

DNS round robin is not aware of the server state and will continue to direct a share of connections to one of the servers even if it is down.

Server 2003 NLB is only unstable if its not set up correctly. You need to understand the features and requirements of the different multicast choices vs unicast. Unicast will require at least 2 IPs per server and will flood a physical switch. Works great if both servers are virtual and are on the same physical host because you only flood the virtual switch, but other than that multicast is better. You may have to turn on IGMP snooping on the switches or use static ARP entries to prevent the switch from flooding the multicast packets. Talk to your networking team to determine what your switches are capable of and if any configuration changes need to be made.

You could also use a hardware load balancer such as a Citrix NetScaler or a BIG-IP from f5. They aren't free, but they can give you additional functionality such as SSL offloading or act as a reverse proxy.

mikedisd2

Sounds a lot more complicated than I remember; need to do some more research.
Thanks for the info, afraid there may be politics involved if I need to talk with the network team. It's a bit of a 'warring tribes' mentality where I work.

Hyper-Me

mikedisd2 wrote: »

Sounds a lot more complicated than I remember; need to do some more research.
Thanks for the info, afraid there may be politics involved if I need to talk with the network team. It's a bit of a 'warring tribes' mentality where I work.

That sounds like my last job.

Although it was usually me telling the network team they were dumb for not knowing what STP was and not using SMTP.

Paule123

2003 NLB can be a pig to get working! Posted recently about a new blade chassis setup we were installing it on.

Still in very early stages implementing it but was a bit of a cost cutting exercise over buying a dedicated hardware load balancer. Theres loads of documents on the web about nlb use and potential issues.

Id go with nlb over round robin everytime though

mikedisd2

Been reading up on the best approach. Still a bit confused on the unicast/multicast options. Assuming I have only 1x NIC per server and both servers are VMs, should I use unicast? Will this mess up the back-end connection to SQL?

tenrou

I have to admit that I tend to just go with multicast as I have had no problems in getting it working before.

We've got an NLB on MOSS 2007 where I work so it'll definitely work but Windows NLB is not an ideal solution if you want to do anything more fancy that just basic load balancing.

mikedisd2

tenrou wrote: »

I have to admit that I tend to just go with multicast as I have had no problems in getting it working before.

We've got an NLB on MOSS 2007 where I work so it'll definitely work but Windows NLB is not an ideal solution if you want to do anything more fancy that just basic load balancing.

Cool so I can run just a simple NLB setup and it ought to work fine? I tried it in my lab last night and it complained of IP conflicts. Switching to unicast, I couldn't ping the server IPs. Then I couldn't remove NLB to get back to the original state.