By Michael Van Hornebeeck, SearchExchange.TechTarget.com
Ever since Exchange 2010, load balancing has become an essential part of highly available Exchange Server infrastructures. While the new Exchange 2013 architecture allows for other, perhaps easier, ways to support load balancing requirements, there are still various options to choose from.
As with most IT topics, it's best to start with the basics. This is no different with load balancing for Exchange 2013. When setting up load balancing for your Exchange infrastructure, the following concepts will always be involved:
For example, if a server is down, it is removed from the pool of servers and will not receive traffic until it is available. Depending on the make and model of your load balancer, a health check may be anything from a simple ping to an advanced script that checks end-to-end functionality of the VS on the real servers.
Load balancing typically operates at two different layers: Layer 4 (L4) and Layer 7 (L7). When talking about load balancing, we're really talking about network, right? Try hard and I'm sure you'll remember some -- if not all -- of the layers of the famous OSI model.
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