>> You have to be careful about your network architecture as well, to ensure >> you allow bandwidth for "broadcasting" requests across the cluster. > >I must admit ignorance to the under-the-hood mechanics of NLB. How does it distribute the >requests? Do all packets get redirected through the load balancing server?
There isn't a single load balancing server, per se. With NLB, there is a virtual IP address of the cluster. Every server in the cluster will see every request to the virtual IP at it's network interface. Then each server individually execute a hash algorithm to determine if it should service this particular request or not. Each server will come to the same hash result, which leads to one and only one server being responsible for a given request. Periodically, the servers all talk to each other to revise the hash parameters. So if you add a machine, for example, they will change some parameters on the fly to have the new machine service its share of requests. Greg Reinacker Reinacker & Associates, Inc. http://www.rassoc.com You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
