RE: Windows 2003 - NLB
- From: Jason Carter <JasonCarter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2005 09:44:02 -0700
Maybe I can help out here, I just had to do this recently.
I am not sure how far you have gotten, so I will just start at the beginning.
First, on one of the web clients, open the properties on the primary network
connection. Enable Network Load Balancing. Under the first tab, Cluster
network parameters, put in the IP address you want both servers to respond
to. For example, if your two machines Web1 and Web2 are 192.168.1.1 and
192.168.1.2 respectively, and you want the virtual web address to be
192.168.1.3, enter 192.168.1.3 in the Cluster Network Parameters tab. Give
the load balanced server a DNS name like Bridge.domain.com or something and
manually enter that name and the virtual IP address (192.168.1.3 in this
example) in your DNS zone.
In the second tab, Host Parameters, enter the IP address of the host -
192.168.1.1 for web1 in this example.
The third tab, Port Rules, I would modify to include only 80 and 443. Set
the affinity to none and equal on the load balance.
On the second interface, you need to give it an IP address on a completely
different subnet (actually, I do not know if it is needed, but this worked
very well for me.) You might want to just set it to something like
10.10.10.1/30, NO DEFAULT GATEWAY.
Do the same on the other server, Web2, but obviously give it 192.168.1.3 for
the Cluster address (same dns name), 192.168.1.2 for the host, and modify the
second NIC to 10.10.10.2/30, again no default gateway.
You need to connect the two secondary NICS on the server either with their
own VLAN or just by a cross-over cable. I would recommend the cross-over
cable to start with just to make it easier or if you never expect to put more
than two servers in this load balance. If you do expect to put more in, I
would create the vlan and modify the IP addresses you placed on the NICs to a
larger subnet (/30 only has two usable addresses.) You could probably just
set the NICS to 10.10.10.1/24 and .2/24 to give you more than enough
addresses and it really won't hurt anything.
Next, you need to run the nlbmgr.exe from either your workstation or another
W2k3 server (one NOT connected to this load balance.) I think nlbmgr.exe is
part of the admin pak (installed from the win2k3 cd - adminpak.msi) if you
want to run it locally. I do.
Once opened, right click on the Network Load Balancing Clusters (upper left
under the File, Cluster, etc options) and choose Connect to Existing. Put in
your virtual IP address (192.168.1.3 in our example) and choose Next and
Finish if it finds it. You may receive and error at this point if both
servers are set to the #1 priority. That is OK.
Once your NLB is open for this set, right click on either server and choose
Host Properties. Change the priority to 1 on one of the servers and 2 on the
other. What this actually does is choose a computer to act as a traffic
director for inbound web traffic. Web traffic will all come to the computer
with the #1 priority by default, then that machine decides who will handle
the request.
Close nlbmgr.exe and reopen. You should now have green icons for each server
(after you connect to the load balance again.)
You can test this out by sending three continuous pings, one to each host
address and one to the virtual address and then restart one of the servers.
The host ping should stop replying while the virtual IP address should not
skip a beat.
Be aware that Microsoft load balances based on a connection at layer 3, the
IP address. That means that if you are doing some testing to make sure that
the load balancing is working, you must test from machines that come as two
different IP addresses. We learned this the hard way when we had multiple
users in a remote office hitting the web servers and could only see one
server responding while the other sat idle. This was because while the other
office computers all had different IP addresses, they got NATed to the same
IP address through their firewall. The NLB saw all these computers as the
same computer and routed all traffic to the primary server.
I hope that helps.
"Peter" wrote:
> Any help very much appriecated in the following matter:
>
> We have two web servers that we need Network load balanced running mutiple
> Web sites, some of these web sites connect to back end databases.
> The Web sites run Windows 2003, and to make them more fault tolerant we are
> looking to install NLB.
> Both servers have two NICs
> NIC 1 = 192.168.10.1/24
> NIC 2 = unconfigured
>
> Access iwill be direct via firewall port mapping 80/443 to cluster IP address
>
> To set up the management card do i need to configure the 2nd NIC with the IP
> 192.168.10.2/24, so as to configure one NIC with the NLB details and the
> other leave for the management as recommended: quoted below:
>
> "Although not required, it is recommended that you use a separate management
> network adapter to provide a communication path that is isolated both from
> the cluster adapter and from the clients"
> How do i configure this management card??
>
> As you can see i am getting confused any help gratefully appreciated
>
> Regards
>
> peter
.
- References:
- Windows 2003 - NLB
- From: Peter
- Windows 2003 - NLB
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