MSMQT supports hardware load balancers... kinda

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MSMQT supports hardware load balancers... kinda

When migrating the solution from a single server to a multi-server staging environment, my client experienced problems with MSMQT service instance times running into minutes. We were using an Alteon hardware load balancer, but all the documentation only mentioned using NLB - I could find nothing that confirmed or denied that it was possible to use anything other than NLB. An example of this woolliness is KB 898702 which states you can try using NAT devices but they're not officially supported.

Anyway, when we installed NLB instead, it worked a treat. And we got this definitive response from PSS:

We support hardware load balancing with the exception:

- We don’t support NAT

- Sticky IP must be implemented

Turns out our hardware load balancer uses NAT internally, so that was presumably our problem. Has anyone successfully used a hardware load balancer with MSMQT? I guess I don't understand how the BTS app servers could bind to its IP address given it'd be external to them...

Print posted @ Tuesday, November 01, 2005 3:17 PM

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# re: MSMQT supports hardware load balancers... kinda

Hi,

regretfully we are facing the same problem you are.
We move our UAT environment to with Alteon LB and now we
are back to work with WLBS )-:

WLBS make it's work,
But the main issue is that it's not support adding new BTS machine to the group which not connected to the same network switch.
For that we can't implement DRP environment which is not at the same area ...

I'd thankful to heard if you have any BTS DRP architecture.
btw this issue with msmq-t will be solved with BTS2006 which have msmq adapter and not msmqt...
see quote from one of our MS architects :
"BTW, BizTalk 2006 supports MSMQ (and not MSMQT) adapter which is said to be more performant . I'm not sure you handling fail over with current MSMQ implementations, but we could use the same mechanisms, while maintaining no MS NLB for other communication (HTTP and Web Services)."
11/16/2005 7:02 AM | Ronen

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