Load Balancing Navision Server NAV2013R2

sre · 2014-02-10

I'm currently looking for a way to automatically balance the load between several Middle Tier Servers (it's a customer with about 120 user who demands that). The customer doesn't want to assign users to Middle Tier Servers by setting up the appropriate shortcuts.

I've come accross some older topics where possible solutions have been discussed but as far as I know, there is no free or commercial application available:
viewtopic.php?f=32&t=45741
viewtopic.php?f=32&t=45960

Does anybody know about a product in the market for that purpose? Maybe something has become available since 2011 (see older posts) - I haven't been able to find a "out of the box" solution.

Thanks in advance
Sascha

ara3n · 2014-02-10

Hello.

A solution that would be outside of nav is using Round robin DNS.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 10%29.aspx

bbrown · 2014-02-10

Use Network Load Balancing: http://www.mibuso.com/dlinfo.asp?FileID=1517

defiant701 · 2014-02-13

You can scale out your deployment by using NLB & port sharing in combination. E.g.

1. 2 VM's (w2k12 R2 for example) both having the middle tier installed -->DynamicsNAV71:7046 (tcp port sharing is useful to have unique ports across your deployments --> especally for multi-tenants interesting)
2. create the name the dns
3. install & configure NLB for both machines

add key for deployment with dns name created.

sre · 2014-02-13

Thanks to ara3n, bbrown and defiant701, really appreciate your comments.

The Round Robin on DNS sounds like a possible solution, even though it's not the perfect match.

defiant701 wrote:

You can scale out your deployment by using NLB & port sharing in combination.

How does this help to Balance the load between 2 or more NAV servers? As far as I understand NLB would help to have a NAV Server available when the other one failes but I don't understand where the load balancing part comes in. Which part did I miss?

Thanks again!
Sascha

defiant701 · 2014-02-14

NLB is load balancing & failover clustering. So when an A record is created in dns and NLB is configured with the correct affinity all NAV services on all machines become available and NLB will choose which ones to use. It's not as comfortable as AX where all AOS instances interact with each other and dedicated instances will act as real loadbalancers on application level. But NLB works pretty cool so far.

bbrown · 2014-02-14

NLB is "Network Load Balancing". It is not "Failover Clustering". "Failover Clustering" is a rather different solution. NLB presents mutliple physical instance of a service as a single virtual instance to the users. The users just connect to that virtual instance and NLB determines which physical instance they use. NLB frees the users from the complexity of rememeberign multiple services. If a user is connected to a physical services that fails, their conenction is dropped. They would then simply reconnect to the virtual service and be directed to another functioning service. In this way, NLB does provide a level of Fault-Tolerance, but it is not "Failover Clustering". Although it is often viewed generically as a "failover" solution.

NAV service tiers on NLB do not dynamically load balance. The "load balancing" occurs only during the connections stage.

In contrast to NLB, "Failover Clustering" deals with the failure of the underlying host on which a service is running. If a host fails, the clustered services are restarted on another node within the cluster.

defiant701 · 2014-02-14

bbrown wrote:

NLB is "Network Load Balancing". It is not "Failover Clustering". "Failover Clustering" is a rather different solution. NLB presents mutliple physical instance of a service as a single virtual instance to the users. The users just connect to that virtual instance and NLB determines which physical instance they use. NLB frees the users from the complexity of rememeberign multiple services. If a user is connected to a physical services that fails, their conenction is dropped. They would then simply reconnect to the virtual service and be directed to another functioning service. In this way, NLB does provide a level of Fault-Tolerance, but it is not "Failover Clustering". Although it is often viewed generically as a "failover" solution.

NAV service tiers on NLB do not dynamically load balance. The "load balancing" occurs only during the connections stage.

In contrast to NLB, "Failover Clustering" deals with the failure of the underlying host on which a service is running. If a host fails, the clustered services are restarted on another node within the cluster.

Yep, that's right. NLB is not "Failover Clustering" per definition, it only identifies if a host is there or not. Round Robin is also just load Distribution, balancing and fault-tolarance. So to say according to the forums question and for all fuddy-duddies there is no real load balancing in NAV so far.

navxhh@gmail.com · 2017-10-16

Hi,

yes NLB is still a good choose. But don't balance the NAV users.
I was also searching for a good solution by MS standard for automatically balance the load between NST's.

If you want addionally a NAV "Activ Session" loadbalacing.
Try this:
https://community.dynamics.com/nav/f/34/t/254712

You can combin it with NLB or use it as your NAV standard balancing:-)

regards sk

Load Balancing Navision Server NAV2013R2

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