Windows Network Load Balancing or hardware load balancer?
 

Anyone have any experience to save me time investigating the options? Does NLB work OK with 4, 8, 16 boxes?

Thanks.

I've used NLBS on a two node web 'cluster'.

Seemed reasonable considering it's built into Windows but I didn't get chance to see the set-up performing underload.

TBH, if somebody has the traffic to demand 4 or more boxes, I'd look for them to have budget for a hardware solution.

I have run 16 on W2k, works very well. Sort out your network properly (addreses, dns, switches)

Should be better on W2K3.

Hardware solutions don't account for things such as server side scripting with ASP.NET etc. They can redirect traffic based on content etc but to me they add a level of uneeded complexity. Depends on the situation.

Thanks guys - didn't expect such quick responses!

Is NLB redundant or is there a single box delegating requests? I'm struggling to find a quick NLB overview on the web.

As an alternative, which (1U) hardware solutions do you think would be worth looking at?

Thanks

Found a decent NLB overview - looks ideal for me. Stops scaling linearly at around 20-25 nodes so I should be fine :)

There are load balancing solutions that also cater for layer 4 stuff too, and have other features such as SSL offloading, back end encryption etc, depends what you want to spend.

We went for alteons which is for our webfarm. Which has made alot of our upgrading and taking boxes in and out of service processes alot easier.

Need plenty of ££££££ and ultimatelty your requirements and SLA\OLA's u may have to deliver to.

Personally I went for the alteons as it as it looks better on my CV ;)

Unfortunately I'm paying for it, so my CV will probably not include Alteons for the forseeable future :)

We use cisco's offering.. they are a bit big though.. and can hang out of the back up some 19" cabs.

David

We are using the Cisco CSM blades which sit inside a 6509 chassis. We also have the F5 BIG-IP load balancers.