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I help administer a small NLB that points to two Windows Servers running IIS which share a configuration. The sites' flat files are replicated using DFSR.

I get the gist of how this all works from these articles.

What I would like to know however, is there a technical or conceptual "primary webserver" in such a set up?

  • Typically load is balanced 50/50 between 2 nodes. But if you have it at 80/20 or even 100/0 (failover only) then you could consider the one accepting majority of traffic as the 'primary' but really the 'primary' would depend on more parameters such as perhaps one box is hosting the shared IIS config or has more services on it than the other etc. But that falls outside of NLB and really the 'primary' depends on your scenario -- it may not even matter? – Brock Hensley Dec 11 '13 at 22:56

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It depends on what you mean by primary, and the configuration of NLB or DFSR.

If you mean primary server for servicing web clients, then it depends on the NLB configuration. Usually no because the default configuration for NLB is round-robin. But a fail-over configuration is possibly.

If you mean primary server for maintaining the flat files, then it depends on the configuration of DFSR. Usually no because DFSR is usually configured for full multi-way replication. It could be configured for one-way replication, but that is rarely used.

longneck
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