Router – LAN Load Balancing Router

load balancinglocal-area-networkrouter

Everything I find is for WAN load balancing. Our customer wants to have a setup where two servers are connected to the same router. To the outside network devices connected to the router, they think they are talking to the server directly. The idea is if one server goes down, then it fails over to the other server. The servers also need to have internet access through the same router, so the router is the gateway. The traffic from the network devices external to the router would need to be forwarded to a certain port on the servers. Each server would have a different IP address of course, but both communicate on port 1024 to the network devices.

Does a LAN load balancing router exist that can do this?

Best Answer

Well, load balancing and 'failover capability' are two different things. The Windows Server OSes have failover cluster capability, which is what you should use. The following is taken from here:

A failover cluster is a group of independent computers that work together to increase the
availability and scalability of clustered roles (formerly called clustered applications and 
services). The clustered servers (called nodes) are connected by physical cables and by software. 
If one or more of the cluster nodes fail, other nodes begin to provide service (a process known as failover). 
In addition, the clustered roles are proactively monitored to verify that they are working properly. If they are not working, 
they are restarted or moved to another node.

Update

For custom software, I would recommend using at least two HyperV nodes in a failover cluster. Each one can have a virtual machine tied to the cluster that has your software installed. Without recoding the app, if the primary vm goes down, and can't be reached by the other(s), the other node will take over. See this example.

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