Load Balancing query

ringo747

ringo747

ringo747

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1 Feb 2006
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Quick question for anyone who knows anything about hardware load balancing...

If you were setting up a new load balancer what all info would you ask me for?
I'm configuring a SharePoint farm which will have a number of LB'd front ends. Is it just a matter of giving them the details of my SharePoint application urls and the IP addresses of the two servers or what other info would I need for them or are there tons of config options?
 
I've only ever used and configured linux load balancers (lvs) so I don't know if there's other info they'll need, but they'll probably ask for the relative performance of each server for the weighting. This allows for even load by sending more requests to the higher performing member servers.
 
Depends on the capability of the load balancers really. We use Alteon LBs which have a fair bit of service down detection capability so we generally end up supplying:

- source port
- destination IPs & ports
- target weighting (for balancing across different capacity kit)
- service down detection method and any required details
- service restoration criteria, eg how long does the service need to be restored for before live traffic is directed to it following a mark down.

To be fair a lot of these can be left as defaults and anyone setting up an LB for you should be aware of what is worth tweaking and what isn't based on the size of your implementation.
 
We won't be using claims based auth but I believe the sticky-sessions will be enabled for things like InfoPath Forms that call SP Web Services.
 
Just on the SharePoint side... we have been provisioned page file and they are 16GB in size. The initial and max page file sizes are set to 16GB. Is this setting ok? The boxes have 8GB RAM.
 
We as a hosting company set all pagefiles to 4GB by default. If you have enough physical memory, then this isn't a problem because the server won't be paging.

The one thing to note is that by setting the pagefile to a value smaller than the amount of physical RAM, you will not get a full memory dump if the server were to ever bluescreen.
 
Cool. So there is no issue setting the initial and max values to the same?

In summary, machine has 8GB RAM, I am manually setting the page file to my 16GB hard disk and specifying initial and max values of 16GB.
 
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Not at all. As long as your server isn't paging, then the pagefile is largely unused, but not unnecessary.

It's actually better to set the pagefile to a fixed size because it will prevent fragmentation.
 
ringo747 said:
I believe it is a Stringray product but I know no more than that.
Click to expand...

Ah, ok - that's from Riverbed. That appears to be similar to the Citrix Netscaler that I use in as much as it is a proper 'application switch' instead of just a 'load balancer'.

On the Citrix Netscaler there is a feature called an 'AppExpert' template which pre-configures the device with an optimised configuration in terms of things like caching, compression, etc for well known Applications - SharePoint included.

It seems that Riverbed call this an 'Aptimizer', and they specifically mention the use of SharePoint. It's probably worthwhile seeing if you can utilise this as it might simplify the configuration for you.

Hope this helps! :)
 
Yes Riverbed sounds familiar. Apparently some of the other guys have it up and running now but they need some more info on the SP side of things.
 
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