The NLB service (Network Load Balancing) is a Microsoft implementation of clustering intended to provide high availability, high reliability, as well as high scalability of infrastructure.
NLB is intended for applications with relatively small data sets that rarely change (one example would be web pages), and do not have long-running-in-memory states. These types of applications are called stateless applications, and typically include Web, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and virtual private networking (VPN) servers. Every request to a stateless application is a separate transaction, so it is possible to distribute the requests among multiple servers to balance the workload. The following figure illustrate the use of a NLB cluster for a web server:
Nlb_00
In this chapter there will be provided the following topics:
Installation on Windows 2008 R2
Configuration Tips