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Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB)

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Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB)

NLB stands for Network Load Balancing. Network Load Balancing has the power to balance traffic across 2 WAN links. As a part of all Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 family operative systems, NLB is a clustering technology offered by Microsoft.

NLB uses a distributed algorithm to load balance network traffic across variety of hosts, helping to reinforce the scalability and availability of mission critical, IP-based services, like web, Virtual personal Networking, streaming media, terminal services, proxy and many more. It additionally provides high availability by detecting host failures and automatically redistributing traffic to operational hosts.

NLB is IP load balancing (it spreads network connection load across many systems). With Network Load Balancing, you’ll be able to unfold incoming requests across as several as 32 servers.

NLB main function is to balance the load among multiple hosts. NLB uses its own distributed rule to load balance the network traffic across range of hosts referred to as servers.

It helps to enhance the scalability and availability of mission vital, IP based mostly services like web, streaming media, terminal services etc. Also it come up with high availability by detection host failures as well as automatically redistributing traffic to different operational host.

By combining resources of 2 or more hosts running Windows 2000/2003 Operating system into one cluster, NLB will deliver the reliability and performance that some important servers need.

What Does NLB Add ?

1] Availability

– Heartbeat – a mechanism to determine the state of the hosts

2] Load balancing/performance

– Algorithm
– Convergence

3] Scalability

– Quickly add node

System Requirement :

  1. Microsoft® Windows® 2000/2003/2008 Advanced Server or Data Center
  2. TCP/IP protocol
  3. Ethernet LAN
  4. Cluster hosts have to reside on the same physical subnet/Private Lan
  5. Services that you want load balance like Web, IIS etc.

Network Load Balancing clusters allows you to manage a group of independent servers as one system for larger scalability, increased availability and easier manageability. One will use Network Load Balancing to implement enterprise-wide scalable solutions for the delivery of TCP/IP primarily based services and applications. it’s not a service primarily based application, it only redirects traffic on a selected protocol in order that the load between the server is well distributed.

Companies whose websites get a good deal of traffic typically use windows network load balancing servers.

Load balancing is dividing the amount of work that a computer must do between 2 or more computers in order that more work gets done in the similar amount of time and, generally, all users get served quicker. Load balancing is enforced with hardware, software, or a combination of each.

Typically, for computer server clustering load balancing is the main reason.