I wanted to add a WFE to our farm and using Windows NLB to load balance requests and I had some questions. 1. If I have Server01 and Server02 mapped to the NLB cluster's IP in DNS, is that all that's necessary to properly route requests? I'm trying to figure out if the SharePoint environment cares that I'm doing load balancing. If the request comes in to sharepoint.xyz.com, hits the load balancer, which routes that request to either Server01 or 02, does SharePoint see anything but a normal request? 2. I have Server01 loaded as a complete install of SP and my Central Admin site is hosted here. If I need to take that server offline, I lose my CA. Is there a way to load up the 2nd server as a complete install and retain central admin? Can you have 2 servers administering the same SSP? I'm guessing no, I'm just trying to plan in case Server01 takes and dump and takes my ability to administer the site with it.

Follow up question, my site uses SSL, will I have an issue when I go to load balance? Server01 is the one with the certificate for SharePoint.xyz.com. If a request for SharePoint.xyz.com is routed to Server02 by the load balancer, are they going to get a certificate error because the server name no longer matches the certificate?

Hi Mickey, You might want to check out the following blog for some useful info on NLB and SharePoint: http://imperfectit.blogspot.com/2010/09/sharepoint-2010-network-load-balancing.html.Imperfect IT - Because when does anything work the way it's supposed to? http://imperfectit.blogspot.com/