Within Windows 2003 server you have the option of Network Load Balancing (NLB). This can be used for load balancing your servers and to a certain extent failover. In this instance we are going to use it for three servers running Citrix Web Interface. The idea being if one of the servers goes down then the end users will get redirected to one of the other two.

 

There are some disadvantages to this ie it’s not true failover, if users are connected when one of the servers go down they will be kicked out of their session, they can reconnect straight away however and will be directed to one of the other servers.

First of all we need to establish how your servers networking is setup. You can use NLB on a single network card but as most servers I come across nowadays have two this document will describe how to set it up for two.

Commonly nowadays you find that if there are two network cards in your server they are in a “Team” using the manufacturers software. You can use NLB with teamed network cards but also, it can cause problems. If you wish to setup keeping your teamed cards please see Microsoft Article 278431 for further information.

For this article I have made the following assumptions:

Your network cards are installed correctly.

They both have a static ip address.

DNS is configured correctly on your network.

You have an available IP address to assign to your cluster.