Network Load Balancing

System Requirements

The following are Network Load Balancing requirements:

Windows 2000 Advanced Server
TCP/IP protocol
FDDI, Ethernet, or Gigabit Ethernet
Cluster hosts that reside on the same physical subnet
1.5-megabyte (MB) hard disk space
Between 250 KB and 4 MB of RAM, using the default parameters and depending on the network load

The following are some additional considerations in creating an environment for Network Load Balancing:

It is not supported for a given server to be a member of both a Network Load Balancing cluster and a server cluster.
Network Load Balancing does not support load-balancing on a token ring network.
Network Load Balancing can operate on a mixed-version cluster — that is, on a cluster in which some hosts run Windows Load Balancing Service under Microsoft® Windows® NT version 4.0 and some run Network Load Balancing under Microsoft® Windows® 2000.
Although only one network adapter is necessary per host, an additional network adapter is recommended for separating, on each host, client requests from other network traffic that is not related to Network Load Balancing, such as content replication or access to a back-end database.

For information about installing or upgrading Network Load Balancing, including rolling upgrades, see Windows 2000 Network Load Balancing Help.