SharePoint University

Here is our setup:

- 2 Front-End Web Servers (FEWS) running MOSS 2007 and both are hosting the Central Admin Site (per the installation)
- 1 Back-End SQL Box Clustered

We installed MOSS on FEWS 1 and 2 and choose to host the Central Administrator from both servers however when you access FEWS 2 and try to pull up the Central Admin site; it pulls it from FEWS 1. We turned off IIS on FEWS 1 and they FEWS 2 said the page could not be displayed. So actually Central Administration is only hosted from 1 server?? This also is the same with the sites and how they are viewed.

We did the same thing as described above accept accessing the site through http://machinename and FEWS 2 would only serve up sites if FEWS 1 was online and working properly. In a true load balanced environment we should be able to turn 1 box off simulating a crash and having the 2nd box pick up the slack; in this case it appears to not be working that way.

PS: The same services are running perfectly fine on both servers. Am I missing something?

It doesn't appear that you have set up network load balancing on the servers yet. This should be the first thing you do prior to even attempting to load balance the servers.

First, do you have a cluster name for the servers? You will need to have a DNS record created for the cluster as this should be your access path.

Next, you will need to set up NLB for both servers and make sure that both servers are responding to requests. In our environment, each front end server has two network cards, so our settings are somthing like:

• Server 1
• NLB Card
• 192.168.0.100 - Cluster IP Address (nlbcluster.domain.com)
• 192.168.0.101 - Card IP
• Mode Unicast 
• Affinity Single for Ports 80 and 443
• Do Not Register with DNS
• LAN Card
• 192.168.0.30 - Server IP (wfe1.domain.com)
• Server 2
• NLB Card
• 192.168.0.100 - Cluster IP Address (nlbcluster.domain.com)
• 192.168.0.102 - Card IP
• Mode Unicast
• Affinity Single for Ports 80 and 443
• Do Not Regsiter with DNS
• LAN Card
• 192.168.0.31 - Server IP (wfe2.domain.com) 

After network load balancing is configured, you need to make sure that both servers can ping one another and that other machines in the network can ping both servers by their individual name and the cluster name. 

Next, you want to change the alternate access mappings for your web site (don't do central admin). Change the default zone to respond to your cluster DNS name. Test to make sure each server is working. You should now be in a load balanced group. We verified this setting is working by disabling network cards.

In our environment, we decided to host central admin on only one server. I haven't even begun thinking about how to get that working as I haven't had the opportunity to simluate this in a test network yet.

Thanks for all the setup information and we are in the process of setting all that up; however as a simple test without getting to technical should we be able to simulate a failed server without actually setting up an NLB to see if pages will be served from both FEWS?  We did this with most of our large 2003 implementations to see if both servers would serve up pages in a clustered environment; before the NLB's were in place.  And even if the NLB's are in place you should still be able to hit the box directly which would also indicate that both servers are serving pages correctly.

 2 front-end web servers should be able to serve up pages if they are both setup the same way; per the technet articles.

 This means that FEWS 1 will server up pages from http://FEWS1.  If FEWS 1 is turned off then FEWS 2 should serve up pages; to simulate an NLB where it doesn't exist; to do this we turned off FEWS 1.  When trying to access the site from FEWS 2 by machine name http://FEWS2; we get a page cannot be displayed because the URL is http://FEWS1. 

 This tells us that the second box isn't doing anything but being a shared services server.  Both Front-end web servers have been setup the exact same; meaning FEWS 1 was installed first and FEWS 2 was 'added to the farm'.  Assigned the same services and choose to run Central Admin from both boxes incase one of the servers fails. 

You may need to check the alternate access mappings and create an entry for each server. For example, create an entry for the cluster name -- one for wfe1 and another for wfe2. In my tests we used Default for the cluster, Intranet for wfe1 and Custom for wfe2. This allowed me to test the servers one at a time. See if that will solve the problem for you.

westdccs thanks for your help with this; here is the outcome based on your reply. 

So I created alternate access mappings (custom) for accessing the sites via http://FEWS2 and it worked.  It also worked for the Central Administration so this is a really good thing.  The only problem is when creating an alternate access mapping for the Shared Services I get a page cannot be displayed on http://FEWS2; however accessing the Shared Services from http://FEWS1 seems to work.

We also noticed that when accessing the site through http://FEWS2 and clicking on My Site; it defaults to http://FEWS1:PortNumber even though we've created a custom alternative mapping for the My Site Application. 

Is you SSP on it's own web application as well? If so, you may need to do the same thing with the SSP.

As for my sites, this one may be more tricky, but we do not have them implemented in our deployment. I wish I could help on that topic.

I'll have to see if I can duplicate this problem in my lab. I don't remember any issues with my SSP.

 I have pretty much the same setup. The Alternate Access Mappings have been an elusive topic at best for me. I have 2 wfe servers, one index search server which also host's the admin site and is the witness server for my mirrored database servers. and two mirrored sql 2005 servers. I created a nlb cluster and gave it the name smvip1.mydomain.com. ip address is 10.1.2.45 When I create a web application i use host headers. So i have a web app called mosssite1.mydomain.com in dns i point that to 10.1.2.45 and it works. I don't have any AAM's set up. Do I need to do this? My default AAM for mosssite1.mydomain.com is just that mosssite1.mydomain.com I'm just not getting the AAM thing. I changed the default AAM to smvip1.mydomain.com and made mosssite1.mydomain.com the intranet AAM. I could get to mosssite1.mydomain.com when I typed it into IE but when I typed smvip1.mydomain.com I was directed to an under construction page. UGH! help.

Thanks. 

I'm not sure I can provide the answer based on the information provided, but here's an example from my environment.

I have two different web applications and mappings are set this way:

• Web Application 1
• intranet.domain.com (set to Default)
• no other alternate access mappings
• Web Application 2
• extranet.domain.com (set to Default)
• customers.domain.com (set to Extranet) 

The participating servers are

• server1.domain.com - 192.168.0.102
• server2.domain.com - 192.168.0.101
• cluster.domain.com - 192.168.0.100

I have set DNS this way:

• server1 and server2 auto register DNS
• cluster.domain.com - A Record: 192.168.0.100
• intranet.domain.com - CNAME: cluster.domain.com
• extranet.domain.com - CNAME: cluster.domain.com
• customer.domain.com - CNAME: cluster.domain.com

I don't know if this will help, but you can tell that this is a combination of DNS entries and host settings in SharePoint.

 Thanks for the reply

How did you get the customer site to point to the extranet site?

Thanks again. 

I went into Central Administration > Operation and then opened Alternate Access Mappings. In the toolbar, I selected my Web Application from the list of Alternate Access Mapping Collection drop down. I then clicked on Add Internal URLs and provided the information for my new zone.

Once this was done, my new zone began working.