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 seven of our new series on Network Load Balancing, we’ll show you how to run the Network Load Balancing URL on a client computer.

To begin, you may notice that the new Cluster IP address is not resolved on your domain name server (DNS).  To remedy this, you will need to add it to the host file of a local client computer.

To do this, go to C:WindowsSystem32driversetchost and open the host file.

In this example, we’ll be using the following IP address:

172.16.17.118           loadbalancing.chau.local

Next, ping http://loadbalancing.chau.local on the client machine.  It should return the Cluster IP address.

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:

• Part One: How to Display Network Load Balancing Manager in Windows Server 2008
• Part Two: How to Display Network Load Balancing Manager in Windows Server 2012
• Part Three: Installing Network Load Balancing on WFE1 in a Three-Server Farm
• Part Four: Installing Network Load Balancing on WFE2 in a Three-Server Farm
• Part Five: How to Disable the Loopback Checking Feature
• Part Six: How to Configure Alternate Access Mappings in SharePoint
• Part Eight: How to Verify that Load on Your Network is Being Correctly Balanced