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Wrapping Up
Okay, now you're really done. Test your cluster IP by pinging it. To test it with a Web site, assign the cluster IP on each server to a domain name for the Web site you want to test. For this test to work, the Web site's domain name must be registered with a DNS server. Make sure that the domain name is mapped to the cluster IP address. If you don't have a registered domain name to work with yet, no worries; just use the cluster IP address instead. The files for the same Web site should be on each server. Have a little fun with it—bring the site up, and then unplug the primary node. Notice that it only takes a couple of seconds before the second cluster node takes over. To test failback, plug the primary node back in and unplug the second node.
Something I didn't get into in this article is how to control traffic distribution across the nodes in your cluster. For example, you may want to have a node in your cluster handle all the traffic for a given user at any given time. Sessioned Web applications, such as those using Active Server Pages, require the user to keep making requests to the same server so that the application can maintain the user's session state.
NOTE
The term sessioned applications refers to Web applications that maintain user information across Web pages, using the Web server's memory.
The evolution of ASP to ASP.NET has fixed this problem. Sessioned ASP.NET applications work with clusters, thus maintaining session state across the machines in a cluster. To set up how much traffic and on what ports(if necessary) each cluster node will handle, see the Port Rules tab in the NLB Properties dialog box (the dialog box was shown earlier, in Figure 3).
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