Configuring a load-balanced website

Enough talk; it’s time to set this up for ourselves and give it a try. I have two web servers running on my lab network, WEB1 and WEB2. They both use IIS to host an intranet website. My goal is to provide my users with a single DNS record for them to access, but have all of that traffic split between the two servers with some real load balancing. Follow along as we set up this scenario.

Enabling NLB

First things first, we need to make sure that WEB1 and WEB2 are prepared to do NLB because it is not installed by default. NLB is a feature available in Windows Server 2022, and you add it just like any other role or feature, by running through the Add roles and features wizard. Add this feature on all of the servers that you want to be part of the NLB array:

Figure 12.1: Adding NLB to your servers

Enabling MAC address spoofing on VMs

Remember when we talked about unicast NLB and how the physical MAC address of the NIC...