Windows Server 2008 R2 Network Load Balancing no balance

load balancingnetworkingwindows-nlbwindows-server-2008-r2

I set up a NLB cluster given two servers (WS 2008 R2). Each server has one NIC card which I set up for a static ip address. I assigned the cluster an internet name (MyCluster), and assigned it a static ip address. The third box is acting as a client sending TCP data (over WCF) to the cluster's IP I configured (static IP). I am observing the NLB cluster from the NLB manager at one of the nodes – both nodes are green, say started. However, I am only able to see traffic coming in to one of the NLB servers. When I suspend it, I see traffic going to the other NLB server, and so on. I was expecting traffic to be split equally between them. I can't figure out what I missed, any tips please?

Thanks/.

Port rules screenshot requested by joeqwerty
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Best Answer

If you want a single session to balance across the two NLB nodes, you will need to change the Client Affinity to None. That will allow each request to be answered by the first available node. Be careful though, if you are using sessions this can cause issues where only one node is aware of the session.

In my experience, I haven't observed NLB to work in Round Robin fashion. To force a single load balancing with a low # of clients rapid refreshing took about 30 seconds before load balancing started.

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