What I also will not discuss any further beyond the following is hardware load balancing.
Really, you have a real business need and are prepared to pay for multiple servers to set up a Windows Network Load Balancing cluster but you can’t spring for an extra NIC? Remember in those days servers really meant hardware and in the Windows 2000 era you needed Windows 2000 Advanced Server or Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. Even in the year 2000 I grinned when I read that one of the drawbacks was the cost of the extra NIC. Do yourself a favor and always use two or more NIC ports. NIC ports are very cheap nowadays and especially in a virtual environment there is nothing stopping you from adding some extra virtual ports. Apart from no available slots in a server to add NICs you have no excuse not to and even then, just make sure you do. Even in a lab you need to work like in real live, bar some exceptions. I think they lack so badly in resilience, configuration and troubleshooting capabilities that I never consider using them, not even in the lab. I will not be discussing NLB solutions using just one NIC with multicast. I would like to reflect on some issues and options when using Windows Network Load Balancing. You’ll find plenty of material on that searching the internet. This will not be an extensive NLB installation & configuration manual.
This is part 1 in series on Windows Network Load Balancing.
