Windows Network Load Balancing

[inCharge.co.uk]

Has anyone tried using Windows 2003 Network Load Balancing (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/library/ServerHelp/98d46a24-96d8-412c-87d8-28ace62323d2.mspx) on 2 or more ServerBeach machines?

Are there any reasons why it wouldn't work? 2 ethernet adapters are recommended but it will work with one. The only thing I can see in the Best Practices (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/library/ServerHelp/fa6ef832-1aa7-472f-b492-0dd3c60bd46d.mspx) documentation is that clustered machines must be on the same subnet. ServerBeach don't promise to issue new machines on the same subnet or even in the same datacenter. I ordered 2 identical machines at the same time and they were on different subnets. Maybe they could be persuaded though - it's a reasonable request.

Are there any other show-stoppers?

Cheers
Julian

[bradsjm]

Has anyone tried using Windows 2003 on 2 or more ServerBeach machines?

Are there any other show-stoppers?


Yep, it won't work. Windows Load Balancing will try to create a virtual MAC address used by both servers which will not only fail it will get both servers network interfaces automatically disabled immediately.

[inCharge.co.uk]

OK, thanks. I just want to understand the issue a little more.

Are you saying that the network cards would be automatically isolated by the switch, or that a network engineer will close down my machine, or that the OS will disable it's own network cards because of some conflict between Load Balancing and some other OS component?

[bradsjm]

As I found out the hard way, the switch will disconnect you if it detects your MAC address has changed and you have to put a support ticket in to have it re-enabled.

It's pretty much instant too as I found when I tried to bridge the network card to a loopback internal network :)

[inCharge.co.uk]

Then I will not be giving it a try. Thanks for the warning.

[sirmanson]

Is this still an issue after all of the new SB products / services that are available? I would really like to setup load balancing between my servers .

[inCharge.co.uk]

There is still no way to do load-balancing at ServerBeach - neither hardware nor software.

The nearest you can get is using one server as a reverse proxy. There are other posts on this solution but I haven't tried it.

[Ron]

My understanding is that it is possible to use the Round Robin DNS load balancing:
http://content.websitegear.com/article/load_balance_dns.htm

I have never implemented it, but I would be curious of the outcome.

[knightfoo]

My understanding is that it is possible to use the Round Robin DNS load balancing:
http://content.websitegear.com/article/load_balance_dns.htm

I have never implemented it, but I would be curious of the outcome.

Round Robin DNS load balancing is a workable solution but doesn't offer much control over which server gets hit and how often. The "Other Considerations" section outlines the major drawback: DNS caching. If your TTL is set to 60 seconds, then anyone getting that particular IP will keep hitting that IP for at least 60 seconds. You can minimize this effect by decreasing the TTL, but this could crush your DNS server on a busy site and some large ISPs enforce a minimum TTL in cached zones. BIND also doesn't do a very good job at returning random records, so you'll find that the first record gets returned 66-75% of the time, regardless of how many A/CNAME records you have.

-knightfoo

[hotshot]

I've always wondered how these radio stations serve up 10,000 19k streams, I guess they use some sort of clustering or something.

[rajjesh]

The original post is over One year old, so I was wondering if we could windows Network load balancing NOW (with SB adding so many new servers and solutions), is there a way I could use this load balancing solution for my sites hosted with SB ? or suggest an alternative load balancing solution for sited hosted with SB ?

[chriswasik]

Now that it's been almost another year, are there any solutions to this problem?

There was a post back in 2005 where serverbeach was saying they can now offer a more flexible IP policy (link to post: http://forums.serverbeach.com/showthread.php?t=4728 )

Does this mean we can do things like run heartbeat, and have one machine take over a virtual IP address when another machine goes down? ...or is that still something that can't be done on serverbeach?

[chriswasik]

Sorry, heartbeat is a linux thing; not Windows software, but I imagine the concept is the same - let a machine take over an IP address if the primary machine goes down.

[IndianaJon]

Well I understand it that would be failover in a Windows server cluster. It's not really load balancing but would rely on the same problematic clustering mechanism.