How does MOSS Front End (IIS) load balancing work?

Question

I would like to know how MOSS Front End load balancing works, just an overview or a link to a site that contains this type of information.

In otherwords, I have 2 front end servers in the farm, how does MOSS distribute the work load?

Answer 1

Sorry to disappoint , but I've just been informed that MOSS does not do any load balancing on its own, you need to set this up yourself outside of MOSS.

The MOSS front end farms only sync IIS content between each other - this is provided by MOSS

Answer 2

MOSS lives on Windows 2003 or 2008 servers. You can enable the NLB services within the OS on the web front ends. I don't recall the OS versions that support that but certainly Enterprise and DataCenter editions...

Answer 3

All server versions support NLB (network load balancing). There are really three ways to accomplish load balancing.

• You can use DNS to point users to different WFEs by handing out different IP addresses for the same FQDN. This is the 5 minute load balance solution.
• The second solution is to use windows version of network load balancing. This is the more robust version of load balancing as it takes into account actual load on the WFEs. If one WFE is processing a large number of request traffic will go to the other box. This solution also accomidates failover if one box goes down. The DNS solution does not.
• The third solution is to use a load balancer in front of your WFEs like a cisco or F5 load balancer. This is the solution for farms with many WFE's.

The next question is how do you know if load balancing is occuring. I wrote a webpart for sharepoint that you can add to any page that tells you what server is serving the page. If your load balancing is working you should see the server name change as you make requests to the same page.

You can get the webpart here: Sharepoint Server Info Web Part