Network Load Balancing

With NLB, you add a service to multiple servers that allow them to communicate and to detect if one of them is unavailable. The servers respond to a single IP address and hostname, sharing the load equally between them. The actual services and content have to be managed and maintained outside of NLB. For example, if you are sharing a web site, you need to keep the folder on each Web server updating with the same content via a script or other technology, such as DFS-R.

Each node in a NLB cluster, up to 32, has its own unique IP address, and the NLB cluster has one or more IP addresses that all nodes in the NLB cluster respond to and distribute evenly. It is possible to elect one node in the NLB to receive all traffic by default, such as with the default host or even by assigning weightings to each member of the NLB cluster to control the portion of incoming traffic each node will receive. If you had a server that was twice as powerful as another node, you could configure it to receive twice the number of requests.