A very interesting question in Technet forums about VMM SSP high availability

“Virtual Machine Manager does not support Network Load Balancing (NLB) clusters in Windows Server 2008, which are required in order to distribute the network traffic among self-service users on multiple Web sites.
what problems or issues present this configuration?”
Well, a basic bing did not get any answer for that so I decided to ask a friend “Brandon” from MS Support and goth that answer
“I understand you are concerning why VMM SSP doesn’t support NLB for load balancing. Please correct me if I have any misunderstanding.

We had  intensively discussed this limitation with our development team previously and the main reasons are that it is not a tested scenario and SSP is not stateless.


1. The main thing is that the SSP is not stateless,  thus when a user connects to it he/she can’t bounce around without a loss of state.

2. we haven’t tested this scenario as a major scenario for VMM 2008 R2.

3. We know customers that are using it for fault tolerance purposes. In order for this to work you need to enable persistence on your load balancer.

Currently , I think the only gain from NLB would be to protect against the web server failure, in which case only the users who were assigned to that webserver would get booted off, but when they login again they would hit the remaining server(s) and be OK. So you can get some mild reliability enhancements but not really performance gains (loading balance). “

I had tested SSP load balancing before and it was fine. I did not get the cahnce to test it in huge production environment but I think I will try to do that.

That all for now folks..