SharePoint 2010 – NLB vs Hardware Load Balancer

In the last period, many times I was involved in discussions with customers regarding the adoption of the out-of-the-box Windows Server NLB (Network Load Balancer) or dedicated hardware solution (Cisco, F5, Coyote, etc.)

I’ve tried to summarize my mental pattern about this argument, in the table below (…well, I censored Duff & Donuts from my thoughts):

	PROS	CONS
NLB	It’s cheaper (already available as part of Windows Server stack). Rapid deployment and adoption: SharePoint team doesn’t need to rely on the infrastructure team for the configuration; No real technical expertise needed;	NLB works at socket level (TCP/UDP) and doesn’t provide any specific feature or optimization for http/https. A dedicated NIC (network card) is strongly recommended. Governance and Operations of NLB cluster could be tricky: more people must be made aware of NLB configurations Configuration could be tricky in presence of multicast traffic. No caching capability is provided: for http/https is expected to rely on Microsoft ISA or IAG; No certificate management: Certificate must be individually managed in IIS; Some Governance is needed; No compression capability: for http/https is expected to rely on IIS 7.x Technology is …antique, well not really an issue but NLB was created to balance COM+ application with NT4/OptionPack
Hardware Load Balancer	Improved Performance, https traffic is managed at hardware level; Low latency during the switching in case of High-Availability configuration. SSL and HTTPS configuration is managed internally, making it transparent to IIS/SharePoint configuration. Caching capabilities if needed (don’t abuse of this). High-Availability generally supports dependency rules on how to route packets in case of unavailability of specific servers/application tiers. Support of protocol specific rules (http, https, etc.) Support of Security Rules; Technical Agnosticism, the tools can be used to balance Windows, Linux, Web Server, sockets, email servers. Governance in the sense that there is a centralized point of management for all the needs regarding balancing, high-availability, security etc.	Expensive, for sure it something to be acquired and identifying the best solution won’t be easy ‘cause the huge amount of options in the market. Learning Curve

Rules of Thumb

• Use NLB if hardware load balancer is not available  and there are no plans on that (polite way to say no budget);
• In the Intranet, if reverse proxy isn’t available (sometimes the hardware load balancer is available only for Internet traffic);
• As Tactical Solution (as example for running stress test on your new project in a stage environment if the hardware solution is not available or cannot be used);
• We can definitely state that a strategic solution must rely on hardware load balancer, a tactical solution could rely on a software NLB.