Brian,
Sorry. Should have been more explicit.
I was referring to modifying the weight and/or priority of the DCs' records
in the DNS console so that you give one DC a weight of, say, 80 and the
other a weight of, say, 20 while maintaining the priority of 0. This will
make it so that the DC with the weight of 80 will process roughly 4x the
number of logon requests that the DC with the weight of 20 will. As it
stands all DCs - out of the box - have a priority of [0] and a weight of
[100]. Out of the box all DCs will process roughly the same number of logon
requests.
So, as an example, the records would look like this out of the box
Left side of the console
Forward Lookup Zone
mydomain.com
_msdcs
dc
sites
D-F-S-N
_tcp
right side of the console
_kerberos [0][100][88]
dc01.mydomain.com
_kerberos [0][100][88]
dc02.mydomain.com
_ldap [0][100][389]
dc01.mydomain.com
_ldap [0][100][389]
dc02.mydomain.com
We would change this so that it looks like this:
_kerberos [0][80][88]
dc01.mydomain.com
_kerberos [0][20][88]
dc02.mydomain.com
_ldap [0][80][389]
dc01.mydomain.com
_ldap [0][20][389]
dc02.mydomain.com
As you well know, clients try to authenticate against the DC with the lowest
priority ( in this case, both have a priority of [0] ). In cases where the
DCs have the same priority the weight value is used to determine the ratio.
Not very well worded but hopefully you get what I am saying.
Take a look at the following article:
http://www.winnetmag.com/articles/print.cfm?ArticleID=37935
It words things much better.
Cary
Brian Desmond said:
No. This is a site link cost. Basically, the site link with the lowest cost
will be used first/most often for intersite traffic between sites.
--
--
Brian Desmond
Windows Server MVP
(e-mail address removed)12.il.us
Http://www.briandesmond.com
Cary Shultz said:
Dave,
Please correct me if I am wrong but this could be 'controlled' by modifying
either / both the Priority and Weight. Out of the box all DCs have a
priority of [0] and a weight of [100]. This could be modified so that one
DC will authenticate twice as many or four times as many logons as the other
( in a two DC environment ).
Cary
Dave Shaw said:
Actually, they technically don't "load balance". There is no mechanism
between domain controllers that ensures they are balanced. What will happen
is; the least busy domain controller will respond faster to logon requests
that the busier one. But I think your point is that it would be good
enough.
-ds
If the two domain controllers are both in the same AD site, they already
load balance.
Oli
Hello:
I have a LAN site with 1200 users and PCs logging into Windows 2003
Active
Directory, mixed mode environment.
I would like to setup load balancing for users logging into the domain
between the two domain controllers.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Ken
