A network is a system of interconnected things or people. A computer network is made up of computers and related resources. Network Load Balancing (NLB) can refer to Microsoft’s technology or a system that evenly distributes processing among available resources. NLB is useful in preventing server overload and denial of service attacks. It can be software or hardware, such as multilayer switches or DNS servers using round robin.
A network is a system of interconnected things or people. A computer network is a network made up of computers and their related resources, such as scanners, printers, routers, and shared servers. A NLB can be one of two things. First, it can refer to a specific Microsoft® technology called Network Load Balancing (NLB) that was part of the Windows 2000 Server® and Windows Server® 2003 operating system family and was an optional component for Windows Server® 2008. The term network load balancer can also generically refer to a system that provides for the even distribution of processing among and among the available resources.
A cluster is the term for a group of multiple servers connected and working in tandem in various ways to accomplish tasks. The cluster can provide both a fault-tolerant and a load-balanced system. You can use a network load balancer to distribute the load to multiple servers in a network and also to multiple disks in a storage area network (SAN), as well as to distribute file protocol requests among file servers. A transaction that enters a network can be split between all servers or can be redirected to a server as soon as it becomes available.
A common situation in which an NLB is useful is the distribution of a large number of incoming HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests to the various Web servers located in a server farm. This prevents any single server from being overloaded. The practice of load balancing helps deny denial of service attacks, the purpose of which is to overload servers.
A NLB can be many different things. It can be a software program, whose sole purpose is load balancing. It can also be a hardware device. A hardware device that acts as a network load balancer is a multilayer switch, a device that inspects and forwards packet traffic entering the network.
Domain Name System (DNS) servers are another type of hardware that can be used as a network load balancer. One technique used is called DNS round robin. In this system, when a DNS request is received, the requests are passed to the servers one after another in a continuous loop. One problem with this system is that it doesn’t account for the requests each transaction will make on the server it’s sent to, so it actually acts more like a distributor than a true balancer, although if there’s no system overhead, it will have a balancing effect.
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