NLB is ooky

Am I the only one that gets an oooky feeling from Microsoft's Network Load Balancer? Seems to be a little bit of over kill for just port 80 stuff. I built a virtual network in Hyper-V with three Win2k3 installations and played around with getting NLB up and running.

Sure, it gets up and running pretty easily but boy howdy if you ever want to make any changes like changing the NICs from a 10.0.0.0/8 space to 192.168.0.0/16 space. Yikes! Errors a plenty and that is after breaking down the cluster and deleting the cluster and then un-installing NLB from the target NICs and the balancer installation only to rebuild. Helllooo "unable to bind" errors!

A bit overkill for what I'm doing. I'm thinking maybe a nice balancer like Virtual Linux Server project or something similar would get the job done. Or perhaps Pure Load Balance (runs under FreeBSD, w00t!).

Maybe I just mucked up something in the process and need to play around more (this is the most likely scenario). Thank goodness for Hyper-V snapshots. They really save the day when prototyping like I have been doing.

I did run into an interesting situation. I created the three above mentioned VMs and Win2k3 didn't have a driver for my notebooks gigabit NIC. For some reason it took me a while to realize I could add a legacy NIC that Win2k3 could see.

I've enjoyed showing off the snapshot functionality by writing one line command lines that delete every file off the file system and then restoring with the snapshot and seeing the machine up and running 10 seconds later. Greatness for prototyping and fooling around!