NLB Testing

quickshot89 · 16 Apr 2012 at 18:59

So for a uni module ive setup a NLB between 2 servers running windows 2008 with the following details, unfortunately the lectures idea of teaching is to just let us get on with it, when we have had no previous module for this (How nice of them to change the course while a few of us were on placement)

Cluster
IP: 192.168.0.200

Server1
Network Card 1, IP: 192.168.0.201
Network Card 2, IP: 192.168.0.203
IIS 7 Installed binded on 192.168.0.201

Server2
Network Card 1, IP: 192.168.0.202
Network Card 2, IP: 192.168.0.204
IIS 7 Installed binded on 192.168.0.202

In the NLB Manager on both servers the status is showing as Converged, which as far as i know means everything is up and running correctly. What I need to do is now test that the balancing works correctly for the IIS, can anyone point me in the right direction to test this? I can access the individual servers for the webpages on .0.201 and .0.202.

Spooter · 16 Apr 2012 at 21:53

Can't you test failover by having two different HTML pages on each. Browse the cluster address and see which html page is displayed and then switch that one off. Browse the address again and the other web server should respond.

Not much nlb experience but that surely proves its working..

Spooter · 16 Apr 2012 at 21:55

Check this out, I'm Sharepoint Administrator and used this before in testing.

http://www.combined-knowledge.com/D...ork Load Balancing on windows server 2008.pdf

ecksmen · 16 Apr 2012 at 21:59

Why do you have 4 network adapters all on the same subnet?

Regardless, there's a few ways.

Perfmon - IIS - Current Connections
IIS logs
netstat -nao | find /i "80"

You can do all wonderful things such as drain stops etc... to manage the nlb.

You could always go fancy and do

ARP -A and confirm that you have the mac of the NLB...

kippermitten · 18 Apr 2012 at 18:14

Create a page under each IIS site with text saying node 1 for node1 and node 2 for node 2, make that page the default page in IIS so the node 1 and 2 pages should be shown alternately or based on your NLB settings when you hit the cluster IP/URL.
I use IIS/Perfmon current connection stats as a nice visual indicator of how each node is doing on my production load balanced systems.
We use Citrix Netscalers rather than NLB, dont know of any places that use NLB in production,its very basic load balancing and even on 2008 R2 doesnt handle node failures too well.