Network Load Balancing Problems

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From: Igor Sotelo (Sotelo_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 11/29/04 

Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 08:27:05 -0800

Hi all,

We actually have the following configuration:

+ 03 Terminal Servers with Windows Server 2003 EE
+ 01 Principal Domain Controller with Windows Server 2003 EE

The Terminal Servers are almost identical machines... dual 3 GHz Xeon 4 MP,
around 8 GB of RAM, RAID-1 with two disks, two 1 Gbps NIC's. We use /PAE
memory configuration on those servers to activate the use of the additional
memory. The PDC is a 3 GHz Pentium 4 HT, 512 MB RAM with 1 Gbps NIC.

All servers are connected to a 3Com Gigabit Swith.

We dont have configured the full servers cluster, only the network load
balancing cluster - which is recommended for Terminal Services.

We choosed to configurate the NLB manager in the PDC, integrating the three
Terminal Server hosts to the NLB cluster. The PDC is left out of the NLB
cluster, but the controlling program is there.

We choose the PDC to control the NLB cluster as it has little load, and in
the event of PDC failure, we will anyway lose the NLB services.

The configuration is:

+ Unicast (for compatibility with Cisco Routers)
+ Multiple Adapters (even when the PDC only has one)
+ Affinity None
+ Only TCP, no UDP

We are experimenting two problems. The first one, is that when we close the
NLB managing program, the cluster configuration is lost forcing to create the
NLB cluster again, join the TS hosts, and choose the protocols and affinity
configurations.

The second problem is that sometimes the cluster configuration seems to get
lost without any particular reason. At first, when the TS clients open the
sessions, the remote users are distrubuted equally among the servers.
However, sometimes the manager stops functioning correctly and assigns all
the users to only one or two of the TS hosts - not using all three hosts as
we expect.

Does somebody knows if there is there a way to configure the NLB cluster,
and the configuration to stay permanent? And why does sometimes the NLB stops
working after being configurated? What should we do, to avoid this behaviour?

Any help wil be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Igor Sotelo.

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