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Allow Client Access to the Cluster

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Applies To: Windows Server 2008

To complete the implementation of your new Network Load Balancing (NLB) cluster, you need to allow clients access to the applications and roles/features running on the cluster. Make sure that you successfully complete all previous steps in the process before enabling users to access the cluster in a production environment.

Enable client access to the applications and the services in the cluster by creating DNS entries. Users will access your applications and services by using user-friendly names or Uniform Resource Locaters (URLs), such as https://www.microsoft.com, which correspond to the individual applications or services on the NLB cluster. The DNS entries allow the translation of the user-friendly name to at least one IP address. When round robin DNS is used for load balancing between clusters, you must create a DNS entry for each cluster.

The following table lists the criteria for determining the number of DNS entries required for your new cluster.

Solution Includes One of the Following Required DNS Entries

Only one NLB cluster.

A DNS entry for the NLB cluster and a DNS entry for each virtual cluster.

More than one NLB cluster with client traffic distributed across NLB clusters by using round robin DNS.

A round robin DNS entry for each cluster and a round robin DNS entry for each virtual cluster.