Managing and monitoring Network Load Balancing

Network Load Balancing (NLB) is a feature of Windows and IIS that allows for multiple hosts to host the same website. The NLB cluster distributes all traffic to the cluster on the individual hosts.

NLB provides both scalability and fault tolerance. If you add additional nodes, the cluster is able to handle more traffic. And if a node should fail, the remaining nodes take the traffic, albeit at a potentially lower performance level.

NLB is a versatile feature. You can use NLB to load balance traffic from the web, over FTP, firewalls, proxies, and VPNs. Performance is acceptable, although many users prefer to use hardware load balancers.

In this recipe, you create a new NLB cluster (ReskitNLB) that load balances between two hosts (NLB1, NLB2). The recipe creates a simple, single-page site on each system, and then provides load balancing and failover of the NLB site.

In this recipe, you create a single-document site. The single document differs on...