Network Load Balancing

[Kiran]

Quick question regarding MS network load balancing, do you
know of a situation where you would want to have a second
IP address assigned to one of the cards in one machine to
make the load balancing work ?

my understanding is...

One VIP address and one real address per machine.

Let me know what you ( and microsoft ) think

Thank you

 

[Larry Stotler]

Hello,

Having another IP bound to the existind card should not be required to make
it work. There are times when someone would want to setup a second,
backend NIC. One reson is for Application Center. Each cluster member in
a cluster that is using NLB requires a management network interface card
(NIC) for the backend network for intracluster communication. The
communication over this network includes cluster administration and
replication.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?sd=tech&scid=kb;EN-US;q262926

Also on some occasions an administrator may choose to set the metric on the
NIC to force outbound traffic out the backend NIC. This is usually to
maintain optimum throughput for heavily taxed servers.

Larry Stotler, MCSE
Microsoft Product Support

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