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Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Configure NLB for VMM Self Service Portal

SCVMM is included with an optional component called " VMM Self Service Portal" for you to manage and access Virtual Machine using a web interface. As a lot of people depend on VMM Self Service Portal, you may want to think about setup a high availability solution for this component. In order to achieve high availability for VMM Self Service Portal, you can opt to Windows NLB.

Here is my lab environment:-

















Requirement:-

a) 2 node with 2 NIC card. Rename the LAN to Public and Private. Private NIC is the heartbeat for the NLB. Configure different subnet from Public NIC.
Server 1: scvmmnlb01
Public: 192.168.1.238/24
Private: 10.1.1.5/24

Server 2:scvmmnlb02
Public: 192.168.1.239/24
private:10.1.1.6/24

b) Join both node to domain.
c) Install IIS component using Roles from the Server manager.
d) Install Powershell and NLB component uisng Features from the Server manager.

Instruction:-

Let look into the following step by step instruction

1. Open Network Load Balancing Manager snap in. On the Network Load Balance cluster, right click and select New Cluster.


















2.Enter the first node computer name and select Public NIC.






















3.On the host parameter, leave the default value.






















4. On the cluster parameter, enter the cluster ip and cluster name. Set cluster operation mode to unicast.






















5.On the port rule, click Edit and change the port to 8081, protocol:-TCP and Filtering mode to single.
I'm going to access the VMM self service portal using http://webscvmm.ms4u.info:8081/ . You can use port 80.























6. Click Ok to start create the nlb cluster.

7. Next, you can start to add scvmmnlb02 node to the nlb cluster. Select the NLB cluster name , right click and select add host to cluster.


















8. Enter the second server computer name scvmmnlb02 and select public NIC.


















9. On the host parameter, make sure the priority is 2. (to indicate the second nlb cluster node)


















Note:- If you creating NLB using Hyper V, please refer to http://www.ms4u.info/2009/10/issue-when-creating-nlb-in-hyper-v.html

10. Once the NLB is setup, you can start to install VMM Self Service Portal on both node.
Select VMM Self Service Portal to start the installation.


11. Accept the license agreement.


















12. On the Microsoft Update, select and use Microsoft Update















13. The system will perform pre-requisite check. Make sure the hardware and software requirement check is passed.


















14. Leave the default installation path.


















15. On the Web server setting, enter the scvmm computer name and change the web server port number to 8081. I'm going to use port 8081 to access to Self Service Portal.


















16. Review the setting and continue with the installation.
17. Once both nodes has installed, please test on the browser by typing http://webscvmm.ms4u.info:8081/
in order to access VMM Self Service Portal.

Note:- This guide is for testing environment.
Microsoft quote:-

To ensure the availability of VMM Self-Service Portals for your self-service users, it is recommended that you maintain multiple portals on multiple Web servers. Virtual Machine Manager does not support Network Load Balancing (NLB) clusters in Windows Server 2008, which are required in order to distribute the network traffic among self-service users on multiple Web sites.