IIS 6.0 Load Balancing and ASP.NET In-Proc Session

Question

We have three web servers in our web farm that are load balanced using the Network Load Balancing Manager in Windows 2003. The sites that run on these boxes use In-Proc ASP.NET session. Our assumption is that the balancing uses a "sticky" session because users seem to be assigned to a given server during their use of the application as well as there doesn't appear to be any session error where the session data is residing on a previous machine. My question is how can I 1) verify that our balancing configuration is using "sticky" sessions and 2) can someone explain the load balancing feature in Windows 2003 relative to ASP.NET web applications?

Answer 1

I'd recommend this article. It covers the basics on the Server 2003 Network Load Balancing and covers Single Affinity configurations which allow clients to connect to the same servers for the length of their session.

http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/loadbalancing/networkloadbalancingwindows2003.asp