Network Load Balancing for SharePoint 2013, Part 5: How to Disable the Loopback Checking Feature

When it comes to SharePoint, it is not uncommon for most companies to use a single farm for sharing information amongst its users. While this makes installation convenient, it can severely slow down access as well as increase your vulnerability to risk.

In order to mitigate the negative effects, you can install multiple Web Front-end (WFE) servers and a Network Load Balancer (NLB) to distribute requests and increase reliability through redundancy. With these risk mitigation measures in place, if a WFE server fails, the NLB can distribute requests to other WFE servers.

In part five of our new series on Network Load Balancing, we’ll show you how to disable the loopback checking feature on your Web Front-end servers. This will be helpful later when we are configuring our Search Index.

To set the DisableLoopbackCheck registry key, you will need to do the following:

Click Start > Run and type regedit.  Click OK.

In the Registry Editor window, locate and click on the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlLsa

Right-click Lsa and select New.  From there, click QWORD Value.

Type DisableLoopbackCheck and then press ENTER.

Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck and then click Modify

In the Edit QWORD Value window, type 1in the Value data box and then click OK.

Quit the Registry Editor.

You will now need to restart your computer including WFE1, WFE2, and SQL Server.

Want to learn more about Network Load Balancing and how you can load balance Web traffic in order to increase the availability and reliability of your SharePoint solution?  If so, check out the rest of our series:

Kumar
wrote
re: Network Load Balancing for SharePoint 2013, Part 5: How to Disable the Loopback Checking Feature
on Tue, Jun 3 2014 1:39 PM

Can you give me a little more information on why we need this step for Search Index?  Is this needed only for testing purposes?