New Posts New Posts RSS Feed: Load Balancing the BOS?
  FAQ FAQ  Forum Search   Calendar   Register Register  Login Login

Load Balancing the BOS?
 Post Reply Post Reply
Author
  Share Topic Share Topic  Topic Search Topic Search  Topic Options Topic Options
richmccloud View Drop Down
Newbie
Newbie
Avatar

Joined: 11-Apr-2008
Location: United States
Posts: 5 		Post Options Post Options   Quote richmccloud Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Load Balancing the BOS?
    Posted: 21-May-2008 at 1:03pm
Hi,
 
All of the documentation states that load balancing should be a trivial matter since the architecture is effectively stateless; however, I am not seeing this in my test environment.  Here is my setup:
 
Server #1 - BOS running under ServerConsole.exe (Windows Server 2003 Sp2)
Server #2 - BOS running under ServerConsole.exe (Windows server 2003 Sp2)
Client machine - running Winform app (Windows XP)
Database server running SQL 2005 Sp2 (Windows Server 2003 Sp2)
 
Both of these servers have MS Network Load Balancing configured with a Virtual IP to balance port 9009 with Affinity set to None.  The Servers are listening on Port 9009 using the http virtual IP address of the NLB cluster.
 
With Affinity set to None, each "request" from the client to the server should be balanced so as I use the application I should be seeing connections on each machine (using MS Port Query to trace connections).  I am not seeing this.  Additionally, if I close the application on the client and re-open I am always connecting to the 1st server to have received the initial request from my client.  Furthermore, if I close down ServerConsole.exe on Server #1 (the one receiving all of the connections), the application exceptions.  I see the same behavior using Single for the Affinity so if I shut down the serverconsole.exe on Server 1, the client should be balacing to server 2...no luck.
 
If anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate it.
 
Thanks
 
 
Back to Top
davidklitzke View Drop Down
IdeaBlade
IdeaBlade
Avatar

Joined: 14-Jun-2007
Posts: 715 		Post Options Post Options   Quote davidklitzke Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 22-May-2008 at 9:14am
Rich,
 
This would sem to be a problem with the configuration of your Load Balancer.  There is nothing that DevForce could be doing that could explain this behavior.
 
David


Edited by davidklitzke - 22-May-2008 at 9:14am
Back to Top
davidklitzke View Drop Down
IdeaBlade
IdeaBlade
Avatar

Joined: 14-Jun-2007
Posts: 715 		Post Options Post Options   Quote davidklitzke Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 23-May-2008 at 2:06pm
My apologies for my previous unhelpful and probably incorrect response.   While we have shown that it is fairly trivial to set up a hardware load balancer in an IIS Deployment, we have never configured a Console Server with a Software Load Balancer.  We'll perform this experiment in our own lab and get back to you.
Back to Top
richmccloud View Drop Down
Newbie
Newbie
Avatar

Joined: 11-Apr-2008
Location: United States
Posts: 5 		Post Options Post Options   Quote richmccloud Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 23-May-2008 at 2:40pm
Thanks David.
 
I'm actually using Microsoft Network Load Balancing (software load balancing built into the OS).  I actually have multiple clients balancing now but I'm having issues with clients being able to failover when one of the load balanced BOS server becomes unavailable.  I've configured the load balancing with multicast support since I'm only using a single NIC.  I am continuing to investigate whether the NLB software is correctly communicating (and removing that node from load balancing) with each node when a load balanced port (9009 in this case) becomes unvailable.
 
I appreciate you looking into this.
 
I have however been unable to correctly load balance multple requests from a single client when load balancing Affinity (or Sticky) is set to None.  Whether this is possible with the persistence service I'm not sure. 
 
Thanks again.
 
Rich
Back to Top
 Post Reply Post Reply

Forum Jump Forum Permissions View Drop Down