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load balancing on 2 different machines

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by gandal

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I have a situation that I would like to find out about the load balancing function found with Windows 2000 Advanced Server. I have two servers that have different spec. of hardware: one has 140 GB with PIII 600 and second one has 35GB with PIII 500. Can these 2 machines configure so that they can have network load balancing since the intranet web server will be running on these machines? I would like to sync only shared files between these 2 servers, less than 35 GB.

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by colesky

Yes, this can be done with Network Load Balancing (NLB). You see NLB uses a load algorithm that determines the load on each NIC card by keeping track of the I\O which is also based on the MAC address. From a hardware perspective it does not matterwhat kind of machines you have, with regards to 100Mhz differece it shouldn't be a big deal. With you web application, just make sure you keep an identical copy of the application on each server with whatever means of replication you choose. I tend to also use a internal network connection on seperate NIC cards using a crossover with a private network. (i.e. 192.168.0.1 and X.X.0.2)

In a perfect world you would have identical pieces of hardware, it just makes sense, but you can get by with what you have if you budget is limiting.

I hope this helps! Be sure to check Microsoft's website on NLB, there are a few tricks to get it to work.

Cheers,

Colesky

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