How does performance typically compare between Windows Network Load Balancing (Active-Active) and Windows Failover Clustering (Active-Passive)?
When configuring Windows Network Load Balancing, it is recommended that you aim for an average utilization under 40% (if you are going to have two servers in the farm, for example), so that if one of the two servers go down, the one remaining server will be able to handle the “typical” load on its own. For example, you estimate that your average message traffic will be 40 messages/ second. If each of the two servers in your farm can process 20 messages/ second using 30% of their capacity and could process 40 messages/second using 60% of their capacity. With both running, your farm can easily handle the 40/second and can also handle peak loads of 80/second using 60% of each of the servers. If one were to go down, the single leftover machine could still handle the 40/second with 60% with a little left over. For Windows Clustering, you configure a server to always be handling the entire load. So, the configuration of each of the two machines would like be more highly configured than the N
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