Enabling Round Robin and Netmask Ordering

So, what is Round Robin?

It’s a method of load balancing that enables you to spread the network load between servers on your network.

For example, let’s say I have three WEB servers hosting the same content with three A host records.

All with the same name of SA but with different IP addresses.

The goal is to load balance between these three servers to help share the network load.

That’s exactly what Round Robin will do. I’ve created another record called a CNAME record. This record maps the alias name in this case, www to the true name sa.serveracademy.

From our DNS server. We can check the status of Round Robin and Netmask Ordering from Server Manager.

Let’s go ahead and open server manager, click tools, and DNS manager, from our server right click then **click properties, **then click Advanced.

And you can see that round robin and netmask ordering are both checked and enabled by default.** **

• Now I’ll show you how round robin works

• The 1st client will get the 1st address, then the second address, then the third address. The second client will get the 2nd address first, the third address 2nd, and the 1st address third. Then the third client will get the 3rd address first the 1st address second, and the 2nd address third and down the line.

The 4th client would get the 1st address again then back and forth and back and forth.

• So, the advantage of Round Robin is to ensure that there is load balancing anytime duplicate names are found with different IP addresses in the DNS environment.

• We can test Round Robin by opening a DOS prompt in administrator mode and typing nslookup, then pressing return. This puts nslookup in interactive mode.

• Now type www.serveracademy

• if you recall that is our CNAME record and press return

• Now press the up arrow key and press return.

Each time you press the up arrow key, and…