Administering an ISP Installation

Defining Load Balancing

Load balancing involves distributing client requests across multiple servers within a Web cluster. Basically, load balancing boosts throughput while keeping response times low. With Network Load Balancing, which is built into Windows 2000 Server, the host detects every incoming IP packet, but only the intended recipient can accept it. Each Network Load Balancing host can specify the percentage of packets that it will handle. Alternatively, the packets can be equally distributed across all of the hosts. If one host fails, the load balancing mechanism redistributes the packets among the remaining hosts.

With the scalability that Network Load Balancing offers, as demand increases, you can upgrade the servers you already have or add new computers to the cluster in order to handle more IP traffic.

The next section describes the load balancing features offered by Windows 2000 Advanced Server: Network Load Balancing, and Cluster Service.