Configuring NLB across multiple servers

One of the easiest methods of making a website highly available is to use a Network Load Balancer (NLB). The NLB role resides on the web servers themselves and provides a virtual IP address that balances traffic between the individual nodes. Clients make requests to the virtual address, and the web servers communicate with each other to determine which will service the request.

This results in a website that is highly available and can sustain individual server failures, but also provides a scale-out capability to grow websites quickly and easily.

This recipe will cover setting up and configuring an NLB cluster in order to provide a redundant website infrastructure.

Getting ready

To configure NLB, we will need a minimum of two servers with three static IP addresses, all connected via a common Ethernet segment. As you can see in the following diagram, I have predetermined my IP addresses of 10.10.10.241 for Web1, 10.10.10.242 for Web2, and 10.10.10.240...