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Can I do NLB on VMs using two physical Hyper-V Servers?

Server 1 - Hyper-V

Dual Xeon - 16 GB RAM

VM1 = Webserver

VM2 = SQL Server

VM3 = Exchange Server

Server 2 - Hyper-V

Dual Xeon - 16 GB RAM

VM1 = Webserver 2

VM2 = SQL Server 2

VM3 = Exchange Server 2

Now I want to know if its possible that I load balance the two webservers (Server1.VM1 and Server2.VM1) with each other and also do the same with the other pair of the servers, Exchange and SQL, so that if any of the VMs failed the other takes over or they balance the load.

And also I would like to know if its possible I share one storage like a SAN for the VMs in other word is it possible to combine Hyper-V failover cluster with NLB?

Tala2012
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1 Answers1

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What problems are you trying to solve? Load balancing? High availability? Failover capability?

Yes, you can use NLB for the webservers. Depending on what OS your guest is running, you may need to install a hotfix on the guest and/or setup additional NIC's on your guest depending which method you use with NLB. There are some other caveats to using NLB as well that you can do some research on your own.

For Exchange, I wouldn't use NLB. If you are using Exchange 2010, setup and configure a DAG and CAS Array if needed. Exchange 2007 has CCR.

For SQL, again, I wouldn't use NLB. Why not setup an actual SQL cluster and/or get logshipping going. If you have SQL2012, you can look at setting up AlwaysOn.

For the last part, having a shared storage allows you to setup a Hyper-V cluster. You wouldn't be using NLB at all as you would be using Microsoft Cluster Services and would allow you to have a much larger feature set than NLB. What problem do you think NLB on the hosts would help you solve?

Not to be mean, or rude, or sound disrespectful, but if you do not understand the capabilities of the technologies you are trying to implement, please take the time to read through some of the documentation for the products and/or work directly with a vendor that can provide you greater insight into what each product can provide you.

Rex
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  • Well, I need load balancing on webserver and sql server and high availability on Exchange. I have done load balancing on two physical server with IIS and server 2008 I know how it works. I also have done failover cluster for hyper-v using SAN. I just wanted to know how I can do load balancing as well as failover clustering on these two servers with their VMs. – Tala2012 Jun 04 '13 at 21:59