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Manage network bandwidth

  • Article

Updated: June 9, 2010

Applies To: Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2

You can use the goals below to determine your preferred method for managing network bandwidth.

  • Optimize wide area network (WAN) bandwidth between your main and branch offices

  • Specify the network traffic that has the highest priority on your network

  • Balance network traffic between server computers that are members of a failover cluster

Optimize wide area network (WAN) bandwidth between your main and branch offices

To accomplish this goal, you need to deploy BranchCache enabled content servers and perform other tasks. For more information, see BranchCache at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149834.

Specify the network traffic that has the highest priority on your network

To accomplish this goal, you can use Quality of Service (QoS), which allows you to specify the priority of network traffic and to manage network bandwidth. For more information, see Quality of Service at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=131686.

Balance network traffic between server computers that are members of a failover cluster

To accomplish this goal, you can use Network Load Balancing (NLB), which load balances network traffic (sent to a cluster virtual IP address) among multiple servers in an NLB cluster. For more information, see Network Load Balancing at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=187652.