Load balance Virtual Machines

[euphony]

We are creating VM' s which will be setup as web servers. They will be windows 2003 VM with IIS. I have been asked to load balance these VM's. Whats the best way to do this in a VMware environment. Is it the normal NLB we use on physical servers or is there anything on vmware we can use.

[weinstein5]

load balancing options available on ESX are really not load balancing but more load districution and only outbound - either use NLB like you do in a pghysical machine or you use physical load balancers on your network -

[mrbones]

There is no special way to create load balancing with VMs, in that matter they are no different then physical servers.

Before using NLB, you need to remember the known issue that causes trouble installing NLB on VMs.

Another way is Round Robin in DNS servers..

[Speedbmp]

I have two web server with load balancing make sure you set it up to use Multicast.

take a look at this.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1556

Stephen

[Anders_Gregerse]

You can use products like Zeus (or hardware based products from Foundry, Nortel, to name some) which is an application loadbalancer unlike NLB, which is Network Load Balancing. Applications loadbalancers have features like healthcheck and are protocol aware and can inspect at layer 7 if needed, but they also cost. The good thing is that customers isn't directed to a webbased service that isn't available and I find the network complexity simpler than NLB, where you have manual static routes or multicast which also need to be handled in a special way. Zeus has a trial you can download and try. We are looking into Zeus because we want to virtualize as much as possible and our Nortel boxes are sone due for replacement.

[ISD_Plc]

We use a Zeus ZXTM loadbalancer virtual appliance in our enviroment and have done for about a year. It's invaluable and really easy to use. We use it to offload all SSL from the IIS servers as well as load balance them and inspect and change some response's. Can't reccomend it highly enough.

[AntonVZhbankov]

It depends on servers work and architecture, but one of the ways is to use VM with nginx installed.