Target : We have seven ISS running on multiple servers to provide a better internet connectivity and an ISS routing interface to manually manage the network traffic load by shifting users from one ISS to another one.This article is published to motivate the concept of automatic Network Load Balancing and Traffic Routing to provide a much more better and advanced Network Architecture.
Network Load Balancing, a clustering technology included in the Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Datacenter Server operating systems, enhances the scalability and availability of mission-critical, TCP/IP-based services, such as Web, Terminal Services, virtual private networking, and streaming media servers. This component runs within cluster hosts as part of the Windows 2000 operating system and requires no dedicated hardware support. To scale performance, Network Load Balancing distributes IP traffic across multiple cluster hosts. It also ensures high availability by detecting host failures and automatically redistributing traffic to the surviving hosts. Network Load Balancing provides remote controllability and supports rolling upgrades from the Windows NT 4.0 operating system.
The unique and fully distributed architecture of Network Load Balancing enables it to deliver very high performance and failover protection, especially in comparison with dispatcher-based load balancers.
Advantages
Network Load Balancing is superior to other software solutions such as round robin DNS (RRDNS), which distributes workload among multiple servers but does not provide a mechanism for server availability. If a server within the host fails, RRDNS, unlike Network Load Balancing, will continue to send it work until a network administrator detects the failure and removes the server from the DNS address list. This results in service disruption for clients. Network Load Balancing also has advantages over other load balancing solutions—both hardware- and software-based—that introduce single points of failure or performance bottlenecks by using a centralized dispatcher. Because Network Load Balancing has no proprietary hardware requirements, any industry-standard compatible computer can be used. This provides significant cost savings when compared to proprietary hardware load balancing solutions.
The unique and fully distributed software architecture of Network Load Balancing enables it to deliver the industry's best load balancing performance and availability. The specific advantages of this architecture are described below in the "Network Load Balancing Architecture" section.
Network Load Balancing Architecture
To maximize throughput and high availability, Network Load Balancing uses a fully distributed software architecture. An identical copy of the Network Load Balancing driver runs in parallel on each cluster host. The drivers arrange for all cluster hosts on a single subnet to concurrently detect incoming network traffic for the cluster's primary IP address (and for additional IP addresses on multihomed hosts). On each cluster host, the driver acts as a filter between the network adapter's driver and the TCP/IP stack, allowing a portion of the incoming network traffic to be received by the host. By this means incoming client requests are partitioned and load-balanced among the cluster hosts.
Network Load Balancing runs as a network driver logically situated beneath higher-level application protocols, such as HTTP and FTP. Figure 2 below shows the implementation of Network Load Balancing as an intermediate driver in the Windows 2000 network stack.
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Figure: Network Load Balancing runs as an intermediate driver between the TCP/IP protocol and network adapter drivers within the Windows 2000 protocol stack Note that although two network adapters are shown, only one adapter is needed to use Network Load Balancing.
This architecture maximizes throughput by using the broadcast subnet to deliver incoming network traffic to all cluster hosts and by eliminating the need to route incoming packets to individual cluster hosts. Since filtering unwanted packets is faster than routing packets (which involves receiving, examining, rewriting, and resending), Network Load Balancing delivers higher network throughput than dispatcher-based solutions. As network and server speeds grow, its throughput also grows proportionally, thus eliminating any dependency on a particular hardware routing implementation. For example, Network Load Balancing has demonstrated 250 megabits per second (Mbps) throughput on Gigabit networks.
Figure: Network Load Balancing runs as an intermediate driver between the TCP/IP protocol and network adapter drivers within the Windows 2000 protocol stack Note that although two network adapters are shown, only one adapter is needed to use Network Load Balancing.
This architecture maximizes throughput by using the broadcast subnet to deliver incoming network traffic to all cluster hosts and by eliminating the need to route incoming packets to individual cluster hosts. Since filtering unwanted packets is faster than routing packets (which involves receiving, examining, rewriting, and resending), Network Load Balancing delivers higher network throughput than dispatcher-based solutions. As network and server speeds grow, its throughput also grows proportionally, thus eliminating any dependency on a particular hardware routing implementation. For example, Network Load Balancing has demonstrated 250 megabits per second (Mbps) throughput on Gigabit networks.
Network Load Balancing Performance
The performance impact of Network Load Balancing can be measured in four key areas:- CPU overhead on the cluster hosts, which is the CPU percentage required to analyze and filter network packets (lower is better).
- Response time to clients, which increases with the non-overlapped portion of CPU overhead, called latency (lower is better).
- Throughput to clients, which increases with additional client traffic that the cluster can handle prior to saturating the cluster hosts (higher is better).
- Switch occupancy, which increases with additional client traffic (lower is better) and must not adversely affect port bandwidth.