How to load balance this farm?

Question

Hello,

We have Small High Availability (HA) MinRole farm with 4 servers with two shared roles:

2 Front-ends with Distributed Cache servers

2 Application with Search servers

1 Database server

1 Office Online Server.

Is there any need to load balance this environment?

What are the advantages of load balancing in general?

How to implement load balancing?

thanks in advance.

Answer 1

1. Whether or not you need to load balance your SharePoint farm depends on the expected usage and traffic of your farm. If you expect a high amount of concurrent users and a high volume of requests, load balancing may be necessary to ensure that your farm can handle the load and provide a stable and reliable service.
2. The advantages of load balancing in general include:

• Improved performance and scalability by distributing the load across multiple servers
• Increased availability and fault tolerance by redirecting traffic to healthy servers in case of server failure
• Improved security by distributing traffic across multiple servers and reducing the attack surface of a single server

1. To implement load balancing in your SharePoint farm, you can use hardware load balancers or software load balancers.

• Hardware load balancers: These are physical devices that sit between the client and the servers and distribute the traffic based on various algorithms such as round-robin, least connections, and IP Hash.
• Software load balancers: These are software solutions that can be installed on the servers themselves or on a separate machine. Examples include Microsoft Network Load Balancer (NLB) and HAProxy.

When configuring load balancing for SharePoint, it's important to consider the specific requirements of your farm and the SharePoint roles that need to be load balanced. It's also important to test and validate the load balancing configuration before deploying it to the production environment. You may also want to consider using load balancer probes to monitor the health of the servers and redirect traffic to healthy servers only. It's also important to have a plan for dealing with failures and maintenance.

Answer 2

In your case load balancing two WFE will be good enough. Traffic will be diverted to these two and incase one is down other will be up for end users, minimize down time.