Did my first real foray today into the world of NLB with SharePoint. I’ve worked with plenty of farms which had it configured, but due to circumstances with which I won’t bore you, I was the guy setting up the NLB today.

All in all it seemed pretty easy.  Check out the Combined Knowledge site, Steve Smith has done a great paper on NLB for SharePoint on Windows 2008 .If you follow this … remembering to install NLB on all the servers (Steve misses that bit out :-)) … you’ll have no great issue.  A couple of things to watch though:

• Your NLB Management Server should be of the same version as the NLB servers themselves – even Windows 2008 does not connect properly to a Windows 2008 R2 NLB!
• It’s safest if all your NLBs are of the same version AND the same service pack.

Don’t panic too much if it appears to go wrong – I had a couple of instances when my server seemed to dissappear into the ether.  I found it just get’s allocated a DHCP address so if an error occurs and you can’t seem to connect to the server anymore, RDP drops etc.  Just wait a second and your server will appear again on a different IP.  Then you can reset it back to it’s correct IP, correct the error (if you can)  and try again.

I found it took a couple of attempts to get it right, but it was pretty simple in the end and testing the NLB by stopping one, then the other then starting the servers again showed very simply that the NLB was functioning quite happily.

Good luck!

Cheers

Dave Mc