The Network Load Balancing (NLB) feature in Windows Server (2008 R2 or 2012) enhances the availability and scalability of EntireX Broker and other mission-critical applications. NLB is intended for atomic applications that do not have long-running-in-memory or conversational states. Essentially, each client call to a stateless application is a separate transaction, so it is possible to distribute the requests among multiple servers to share the work load. One attractive feature of NLB is that all servers in a cluster monitor each other with a heartbeat signal, so there is no single point of failure.

In theory, a single broker instance running on Windows Server provides a limited level of server reliability and scalable performance. However, by combining the resources of two or more Brokers into a single virtual cluster, NLB can deliver the reliability and performance that mission-critical servers such as EntireX need.

See Setting up your EntireX Environment for NLB for more details.