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Server Farm Network Element - 12.Oct.2006 9:32:01 PM

redparadox

Posts: 28
Joined: 31.Aug.2006
Status: offline

In a recent article on Publishing OWA with ISA 2006 without NLB, there was a bullet point in the article that stated "You no longer need F5, Cisco Content Engine, or any other external load balancer..." I am being asked that very question in regards to the replacement of our aging load balancing infrastructure. Can our load balancing be done with ISA 2006 alone? As I read more of the article, a couple of questions came to mind that I hope someone can answer. It seemed pretty straightforward to load balance simple HTTP/HTTPS traffic, but can the same architecture be extended to load balancing other things?

Can a "Server Farm" network element be used in other rule other than Web Publishing? We have some non-Windows SMTP gateways that are load balanced today. Could this SMTP traffic be load balanced through the ISA 2006 server?
We have internal SharePoint sites that need to be load-balanced. For the most part traffic to the internal web servers is HTTP. However, for document libraries within SharePoint sites there is another mode called "Explorer" view that takes advantage of the WebClient service running on the local machine. Switching to "Explorer" view ends up initiating a connection on TCP/139 and then Microsoft CIFS/445. Would it even be possible to run these through the ISA 2006 server?

Thanks in advance....

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RE: Server Farm Network Element - 20.Oct.2006 11:11:43 AM

tshinder

Posts: 47490
Joined: 10.Jan.2001
From: Texas
Status: offline

Hi Red,

Can a "Server Farm" network element be used in other rule other than Web Publishing? We have some non-Windows SMTP gateways that are load balanced today. Could this SMTP traffic be load balanced through the ISA 2006 server? TOM: No, the Web Farm load balancing only works for Web farms, not for non-Web protocols. However, you can use the Integrated NLB on the ISA Firewall to accept connections to the back-end SMTP Servers. However, the ISA Firewall won't load balance on the behalf of the SMTP servers, just for the incoming connections to the ISA Firewall array
We have internal SharePoint sites that need to be load-balanced. For the most part traffic to the internal web servers is HTTP. However, for document libraries within SharePoint sites there is another mode called "Explorer" view that takes advantage of the WebClient service running on the local machine. Switching to "Explorer" view ends up initiating a connection on TCP/139 and then Microsoft CIFS/445. Would it even be possible to run these through the ISA 2006 server? TOM: Warm farm load balancing requires that the Web farm members contain the same information (mirrored servers) or perform the same functions (Front-end Exchange Servers) HTH -- Tom

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(in reply to redparadox)

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