Network Load Balancing Functionality Using the functionality of the Network Load Balancing driver, you can load balance client connections by configuring the driver to manually or evenly balance the incoming IP traffic.

Using the functionality of the Network Load Balancing driver, you can configure the driver to distribute inbound client IP traffic across cluster members by using the following strategies: Evenly distributed Manually distributed Distribution based on host priority The priority selection is also seen in a process known as cluster convergence, where a failed cluster host breaks the intercommunications between the hosts and the driver invokes a convergence algorithm. The IP traffic is then redistributed away from the failed host to the remaining hosts that are still active in the cluster.

Convergence results in high availability of the IP-based services, because the client connections are automatically redistributed within the cluster. Network Load Balancing is a high availability alternative to round robin Domain Name System (DNS), which will continue to route IP traffic to a failed host until it is manually removed from DNS. With Network Load Balancing you can manage multiple client connections and their session state. You are required to determine if your application instances can share client state to all of the hosts in the cluster. To resolve client state errors, which might occur with applications that cannot share state, you can configure the Network Load Balancing driver to handle all of the TCP client connections on the same cluster host. When client connection requests exceed your system capacity, you can scale your Network Load Balancing cluster by adding hosts to meet performance requirements.