How NLB will work with IIS-7 web services?

Question

We'are going to join 2 (two) IIS7 web-servers into NLB with the same web-service published (2 instances of the same web-service one per web-server).

• Do I understand correctly, that NLB will work for my web-services, delegating web requests to one or another instance?
• How will NLB work if one of web service instances becomes unavailable (i.e. starts to throw SOAP exceptions or HTTP errors)?
• Will NLB take into account the average web service response time to decide the web-service instance to delegate processing?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Short: NLB doesn't care.

NLB relies on all the nodes seeing all the incoming traffic, then each node drops any traffic it's not interested in. That's before the app gets to even see the traffic - it's not based on app health, not based on response time, not based on fairness or queueing.

NLB doesn't give a rat's donkey about your application. User-mode problems are so user-mode!

As long as the network stack is able to send and receive NLB broadcasts (or multicasts!), NLB will keep on accepting traffic.

Longer: NLB really doesn't care.

NLB runs as a Layer 2 NDIS filter, and simply runs its hash algorithm across all incoming traffic, and accepts the bits that match its port rules.

Every node must see all incoming traffic (multicast/broadcast by the switch), and every node drops packets that don't meet its hash criteria.

NLB is a statistical load balancer. Not a caring one.

• It's not important to it that your app is throwing 500s.
• It's oblivious to the fact that your user-mode listener process has crashed.
• It's unaware that your app is running slowly.

It just. Doesn't. Care.

The best-case failure for NLB is for (one of):

• the box to die completely from a power failure
• the network cable to be cut or unplugged
• (possibly by a vacuum cleaner)
• (or the NIC exploding in a shower of sparks)
• (or being stolen by a passing thief)
• (or any form of physical network interruption)
• the box to bluescreen

Any of these stop the network stack from processing incoming packets, and from sending "I'm alive!" broadcast messages to other NLB nodes, which causes the cluster to get all introspective for a little while (seconds), figure out what nodes are still present, and re-converge.

Then, when the remaining nodes are clear on how many of them there are, they'll start their hashing again, and drop any new packets they're not interested in.

If you need

• health monitoring,
• careful application of load to underutilized servers,
• and response-time-based intelligent decisions

NLB is not the solution for you. If your app is OK with that, or knows enough about NLB to run NLB STOP when there's a problem at the app layer, then it's probably fine. But very few apps do that (ISA/TMG spring to mind).

Looks like I wrote about this a while ago here.

Looking Elsewhere If you're looking for a low-cost (read: free) Windows-based solution, consider Application Request Routing for IIS 7+ - it has most of the health monitoring features it sounds like you're looking for.

You wouldn't run it on the same box as the applications, generally, though, and for availability, you'd typically want to run NLB underneath ARR, to combine network-level availability of the load balancers with app-layer smarts at that level.

Answer 2

• Edited to say my answer applies to generic network load balancing, not Microsoft's NLB service!

The answer really depends on how sophisticated your load balancer is. The simplest set up would be a load balancer sending requests to one web server on another on a round robin basis, and using ping to determine if a host was up or down.

You can use more complex health checks that your load balanced servers need to pass before they are put into the load balanced pool.

To perform a health check you would typically configure a page on your web server that is dependent on all aspects of your web server working. Perhaps some php that looks up something in the database and then writes 'OK' on the screen if everything worked. Then you would configure your Load balancer health check to look at this page and make sure it says 'OK'

If a health check fails, then the server than failed the check will be removed from the pool and no traffic will be sent to it. If all of your servers fail it is usually possible to have your load balancer serve a holding page.

Again depending on how sophisticated your load balancer is, you can use various load balancing mechanisms. You can indeed load balance based on server load, number of connections to the server, you can have some servers receive more load than others, you can have 'sticky' sessions whereby the same client is always sent to the same web server. There are lots of possibilities.