Do we need to load balance Application Server in SharePoint 2010 / 2013?

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Introduction

We generally do load balancing for Web Front End servers and cluster the data base servers. Do we need to load balance Application Server in SharePoint 2010 / 2013?

Skill Level – Advanced

Details

No, that wouldn’t make sense. You load balance the WFEs so that users are sent to the WFE with lesser load at that time, and this keeps them in balance in terms of user load. The app server is not browsed by users, so there’s no reason to have it in rotation. It also shouldn’t have the web application service running anyway, so it can’t be load balanced. Btw, you don’t load balance the servers themselves, but rather the services on them, which in this case are your content sites (web apps).

Later, you would not “cluster” app servers either. The whole point of the service application model in 2010 is that the each place you start a “Manager services on server” for a given service app, SharePoint automatically load balances them – no load balancing mechanism needs to be added. You don’t install service apps on the other servers either, because that creates an entirely new instance of that service app. Instead, you juse go to System Settings > Manage Services on Server, then start each relevant service on your app server.

You don’t need to set up web apps on each server. That’s the whole idea on how it works. You start the web application service on your new WFE, and then all web applications (except central admin) get replicated to that WFE.

PS. NLB is not very good, so it’s recommended to use a hardware load balancer. Yes, you should put each WFE in rotation, but app servers are not WFE

More Details:
SharePoint Service Architecture

Source:
Author: Clayton Cobb (SharePoint MVP)

Org Source:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f3ae16b1-8a3b-4ffa-a2e0-e78a48889c71/should-the-application-server-be-part-of-load-balancing

Other discussion on the same topic:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ar-SA/040f6fc2-7dd1-4291-bae3-fc2fab63a6d1/add-hardware-load-balancing-between-wfe-and-service-application-layer-possiblesupported

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