Install NLB nodes - Windows Server Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's set up network load balancing on Windows Server 2016. We're going to start by going to the Server Manager and clicking on Add Roles And Features. And from here, we're going to skip forward until we get to the Features section, and then we're going to scroll down to where it says Network Load Balancing. Go ahead and check that. Choose to add the features, and click Next and Install. It usually just takes a couple of minutes to install, and network load balancing will give us the ability to have more than one server respond to the same name and IP address. That way, if one of the servers goes down, the other servers can pick up the slack and continue servicing the clients. Now we're going to need to install this on every server that's going to be in our network load balancing cluster, but this is our first server, so we'll go ahead and let this finish up. Our installation is complete, go head and click Close. And now back in Server Manager, we're going to go to the Tools menu and choose Network Load Balancing Manager. And we can see that there is no cluster as of yet, so let's go ahead and create a new cluster by right-clicking and choosing the New Cluster option. And we're going to put in the name of our host. If you don't remember the name, you can always just put a local host, and it'll just resolve for you. And this particular server has two network cards, so we have to choose which one's going to be our NLB network card. And let's go ahead and choose the number three one, 'cause that is our secondary network card. And click Next, and we're going to leave the unique coast identifier to one, this is our first cluster, our first server in the cluster. So we'll go ahead and leave that. If, for some reason, you get a message about DHCP, then you should cancel this and set your network card to a static IP address, and then go back in and continue on with the wizard. Alright, we're going to want to leave the default state as Started, but you can change that to Stopped or Suspended if you have a reason to do that. And let's go ahead and click Next. Now we need a cluster IP address. This is the IP address that all the different servers are going to respond to. And we're going to go ahead and choose an IP address that we know is not currently used by anything else. And it's got to be in the same subnet as our other servers, otherwise this won't work. Go ahead and choose OK, and click Next. Now we're going to need to give it an internet name. So this is going to be a name where we can resolve this, and we can set this up to resolve both internally and externally. And just for fun, we'll go ahead and call it ClusterNLB, just because that is very descriptive as to what we're doing. And now we have the option for Unicast, Multicast, or IGMP Multicast. Now we've got an upcoming video that goes into all this in detail, but we're just going to go ahead and choose Unicast for now. And then we have Port Rules, and we will be discussing this in another upcoming video, but if we just take a look Edit, you can see you can change the port range, and you can change the protocols that you use. We can also change the affinity as well, which is something we will also go over in upcoming work. Let's go ahead and click Finish, and now our cluster is created. And we can see, there's a little clock here telling us we've got to wait for all the information to be added in, so pretty soon, we'll see all that finished, and now it is. So it shows that our cluster IP address is in there, the status is enabled, the ports, etc. And if we want to, we can look at the bottom and take a look at other information, such as the service starting, etc. If we want to, we can delete the host, we can go into the Host Properties, and make changes. We can look at the host status. It says it's converged which means that the IP address of the server is now converged with the cluster IP address, which is exactly what we want. We can also go to Control Host by Starting, Stopping, Drainstop, which makes that particular role go away for that one server. Suspend, or Resume. We can also go in and change the ports as well. I've gone into another server and installed the same network load balancing feature, so let's go ahead and add that post into our cluster. So right-click and choose Add Host To Cluster. We'll put in the name of the server, click Connect, and within a few seconds, we will see the IP addresses of the different interfaces of that server, and there they are. So, I've specified Ethernet 3 for this particular task. Ethernet 2 is going to be the main IP address, Ethernet 3's going to be used for the cluster. Let's go ahead and click Next, and we still have our same dedicated IP address, which is .231, and Next, and Finish. Now it's just verifying the information, and once it's done, both of our hosts will be in our cluster. So the next step will be to go to DNS and add ClusterNLB, which is the name we've given for our cluster, and the IP address into DNS, and so that way, both servers will start responding to that name. Right now, they would respond to the IP address, but most people don't remember those, which is why we created the name. Alright, so that's all done, let's go ahead and switch over to our domain controller, and make that DNS change. We're now in our domain controller, and we're going to go into DNS Manager by going to Server Manager and Tools, followed by DNS. And we need to add a host record that will point to our new ClusterNLB host. So what we want to do is expand our widget.internal forward lookup zone and create a new host. So, just right-click anywhere on the screen, click New Host, and from here, we'll just give it the same name that we gave it when we created the cluster. And then we need to put in our IP address. And click Add Host. Let's click Done, and we'll minimize, and we'll test it out. Let's go down to our Start button, right-click and choose Command Prompt, and from here, we'll just type ping clusternlb. And there we go, our cluster is now responding. If we install duplicate programs or file sharing on these two servers, then they can both service the clients as the clients request them, even if one of the servers goes down, then the NLB will still pick up the slack and the other server will continue running. Now that you've seen a demonstration of installing an NLB cluster on multiple hosts, you can now add the redundancy you need to your cluster-enabled network.